Microsoft Ad: It Costs $30,000 to Fill iPod

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ErikStenger

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Microsoft hired Wes Moss, a certified financial planner to explain the kind of money you’ll spend trying to fill an iPod with music as opposed to a Zune. The commercial is fairly straight forward. With iTunes' "a buck a song" pricing, you’ll spend $30,000 “filling the latest iPod.†With ZunePass, you can have unlimited music, for $14.99 per month.

However, there’s one tiny problem. The $30,000 versus $14.99 per month argument is all well and good but that assumes the user is starting out with no music library at all. Using Moss’s 120 GB iPod example, it’s hard to imagine someone buying a high capacity MP3 player if they don’t already own tons of music. It also doesn’t factor in peoples’ CD collections, photos, or videos they might want to store on their iPod.

Moss makes a good point. Who has $30K lying around to spend on music? And as a heavy consumer of music, I’m all for subscription based services. This ad would probably have worked better with one of the lower end iPods purchased by those who don’t have a huge music library and likely would be starting from square one. Then again, Microsoft wouldn’t get to tell you your Apple MP3 player is costing you $30K if they went with the Nano.

Check out the ad here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ExogURaeI

Oh and for those interested, Engadget points out that Wes Moss was booted off of Donald Trump's The Apprentice in week eleven.
 
Decent point. However, Apple's "a buck a song" thing and Zune's subscription thing (hell, any subscription) are both kind of ridiculous.

I found a site call mp3-sale.org. It's not a subsription based library. Instead of paying as you go, you have an account that you add cash to. For example, if you add $20 bucks to your account, all of your mp3 downloads are $0.15. If you add $40, all of your mp3 downloads are then $0.11. So, in my book, why get 40 downloads for $40 when you can get 363 downloads for $40. Kind of a no-brainer.

Drawbacks? Well, not everything you may be looking for will be there (but there are plenty of things that iTunes and Zune should have, but don't either), and there are no videos. Plus you have to have the courage to part with your cash (but you're gonna do that anyway, just on a smaller scale). But if you're looking for rarities, they will most likely have them and for you electronic fans (Heatsurge, pay attention)... they have more stuff by more artists than you can imagine - and alot of singles that have those particular mixes you may be looking for and even stuff that's out of print. Most downloads are also encoded at 192-320kbps too.

For the brand new stuff and popular songs of old that I know everyone will have, Limewire and torrent sites will almost always have those (although, with the exception of a few bands, most of the new stuff sucks big, hairy moosecock).

And think about this. A year's subsciption from Zune is $179.88. Putting $99.95 in your account at mp3-sale.org makes all of your downloads $0.09. So I would hope that one would be downloading at least 1,998 songs from Zune every year to be getting their money's worth.

Just a thought for anyone that is stuck thinking that these guys are convienient enough to keep on using or for those that "piecemail" their downloads.
 
I got my music for free. By borrowing a couple co-workers ipods and moving their music on to my computer. Thats how I have 9210 songs, 25.5 days, 35.36 GB on my ipod.
 
When I do listen to music, I use di.fm . Great trance station ;).
 
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