Zune's Wireless Song Sharing, Launched 20 Years Ago This Saturday, Wiped Each Song After Three Days or Three Plays

“The catch is that the squirt is fast-drying,” Newsweek’s Steven Levy wrote of the Zune’s headline feature: “in three days it goes away.” One Zune beams a song to another, and the receiver gets three days of it. “Or, if the recipient plays it three times within that period, it evaporates after the third spin.”

That’s the Zune 30, which turns 20 on Saturday. Microsoft’s launch release, dated September 28, 2006, set a November 14 US launch at $249.99 for a “30GB digital media player” with a three-inch screen that “works in portrait or landscape mode,” in “three colors: black, brown and white.” It described the wireless feature as “wireless functionality for Zune-to-Zune sharing of music, pictures and home recordings.” It gives no limit on plays or days.

The release did have a pitch for what sharing meant. Chris Stephenson, Zune’s general manager of global marketing, called it “a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers.” The imagination, as it turned out, had a timer.

Levy didn’t hide his opinion of the timer: “My guess is that people will be turned off because the songs expire so quickly.” He also named the cause: “Microsoft cut a lousy deal with the record labels.” Microsoft’s own executives were more charitable in the same story. Robbie Bach called squirting “a really good first step,” and Scott Erickson pictured “allowing a concert performer to send a song to every Zune in the audience.” A concert performer who could send you a song for three days, anyway.

TechCrunch added a wrinkle two weeks after launch. It reported that “a file sent from one Zune to another will only be playable three times for three days” before it must be purchased, and that Creative Commons artists, who had licensed their music to be shared freely, objected that the Zune “shouldn’t lock up their work after three plays.” The lock didn’t care whose song it was.

Meanwhile the hardware had its own attention-getter. CIO’s launch-week coverage, dated November 13, 2006, noted the Zune was “available in an uncommon brown casing,” and “priced similarly to Apple’s 30GB video iPod—both sell for $250.” If you want the capacity-and-price comparison of the two players, we already ran it. The sharing clock is the part that never made the spec sheet.

A feature built on “share” and a rights clock sends two messages at the same time. The first is that sharing works. The second is that the sharing is a demo. Any device that moves licensed media between friends will keep running into that tension, and the gap between a feature’s name and its expiry date shows up whenever a label is in the room.

Brown, at least, never expired.