I have a soft spot for the Microsoft Zune. I never owned one myself, but I was always a fan of it. Every time I would walk into a GameStop I would make it a point to poke around with one and run my thumb up and down the scroll pad. This was well before the Zune HD (which was an impressive model when it was announced), when the original hard drive-based Zunes were trying to make a dent in the iPod Classic line.
I remember one of my best friends in high school had a Zune, and I was always jealous: it was the exact model that I had wanted. I loved the green and brown colors. You wouldn’t think that shit brown and pea green would be a good combination for a consumer product (and judging by sales figures, you would be right about that), but there was something unusual and rugged about it that I quite liked. Plus, the design of the interface managed to be striking and unusual while still being legible and usable. Not to mention that the physical navigation, while different than the iPod, was well-designed and miles ahead of what other personal media player devices were doing at the time.
Near the end of high school I would have told you that I didn’t have a Zune because I was a Linux user and I wasn’t able to synchronize my music library with one, but the more accurate version of the truth was that I simply could not afford a Zune. Instead, I found myself with a Creative Zen Vision:M, a heavy and chunky personal media player, but one that supported a ton of formats and was much easier to copy music and podcasts onto and off of.
While the hardware remained hopelessly out of reach, the software was another story. I was still a Windows user for a time, and I thought the Zune software was leagues ahead of all its competitors. It was modern, gorgeous, and had a creative side to it that contrasted the more sterile and serious vibe that iTunes had. There were pictures of concerts, and people vibing to music. Sure, the iPod had the colorful ads with silhouettes of dancing people, but beyond the advertising the playfulness barely existed over in the Apple camp.
But what really blew my mind was the Zune subscription service. The Zune was one of the first music subscription services in the world, and I remember the rush I felt for the first time being able to pay one price (I vaguely remember it being $14.99) and having access to every song and album I could dream of. I didn’t understand at the time that it was a subscription, and that the music would disappear when I stopped paying. Because of that, I downloaded every album and song I could think of, in hopes of building out my library. Of course, when the month was over the music all “expired”, but for a brief, shining moment, a future where every digital file you could dream of seemed plausible and, indeed, inevitable.
And it was.
I wish that a modern Zune could exist. One that was built for modern standards, with things like USB-C and Bluetooth. I wish you could just drag music into a folder for indexing, and avoiding all the proprietary sync logic. I want it to handle FLAC files, and MP3s, and maybe even AACs for good measure. It should probably handle podcasts. And hey, why not throw in a few video codecs while you’re at it?
The market for such a device is incredibly small and niche, I’ll admit. But the data shows more and more people are returning to dedicated music devices as part of a backlash against big tech and our modern, ad-driven, social-centric technology landscape. If ever there was a time for the Zune to return, now would be it.
Of course, knowing Microsoft, the version we would get would inevitably be stuffed with some form of Copilot and send a snapshot of everything you do to the mothership every couple of seconds.
In that case, maybe it’s best that the Zune remains in the past, with most of the technology that existed when tech was still fun.