My Zune will knife-fight your ipod
While nobody can argue that someday there will be something to unseat the ipod as the champion of portable digital music, I can’t imagine anyone would have suggested that the Zune would even be a competitor.
I’m not talking about the new & improved Zunes, either. Those are sleek, artsy, and have a whiff of sophistication that may attract some genuine purchases. I’m talking about the brown and black door-stop that was released a year ago. You know, the one that nobody bought.
Well, in order to get rid of them, Microsoft decided to put them on sale at various places in the US for $70, which made it by far the cheapest 30gig video/mp3 player on the market. It was still the ugliest, but that didn’t seem to deter the people who made it the number one device on Amazon for a little while. Still, it’s hardly unseating the ipod in terms of overall sales and influence, right? One can argue that sales doesn’t matter in the realm of the music industry. Those that would argue this way may claim that to be rock n roll, you have to do rock n roll things. While discounting an ugly media player is hardly what any philistine may call punk rock, it has fueled a slight attitude boost in one Wired writer:
I haven’t felt like this much of rebel since I was one-third of the audience for Black Flag’s first Arizona performance. Makes me want create an outsider art T-shirt with the legend: “Screw you! I’m listening to my Zune!” Why, it almost makes me want to remove the black protective case that hides my Zune’s raging brownness.
What makes this interesting is that this is not the kind of attitude that the first ipod owners probably felt. Buying an ipod never came with the feeling of rebellion; rather, it came with the feeling of superiority – a feeling quickly evaporating with every new asshole who buys one.
It’s not a major story and not likely to be a great trend, but I’m forced to pause now after talking to my girlfriend about my upcoming ipod touch purchase and her outright mockery of me for it, and after this article, and wonder if things are changing again.
