Microsoft's name for its upcoming iTMS-like content download portal. Microsoft will offer two options for the Zune Marketplace, allowing users to either purchase songs one by one like iTunes, or subscribe to a "Zune Pass" rental plan like Napster and Yahoo! Music.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/732/732897p1.html

so how suxy is yahoo/napsters rental plan?

I'm going to convert all my money to Microsoft points.

lolrofl! If I ever do that, I know the world must be coming to an end.

what the hell does renting music mean?

means you dont own it and cant play it after a couple of days. i am a big fan of xbox but microsoft is screwing over their products like they do everything. i thought the zune would be awesome when i first heard about it. but the more they released about it the more downhill it went.

I don't like how this sounds. I am not a big online music shopper i rather download it off other ways or just buy the CD.

Renting music is more aptly called a subscription service. You pay a monthly fee for which you can listen to not only whatever you want but however much you and whenever you want as well. Think Netflix without the 3 at a time DVD limit.

So for $15/month you can have as much music as you can cram onto your mp3 player (or hdd) free space.

In theory this really isn't a bad solution. MANY people pay about this much to listen to XM radio. MILLIONS of people pay this much for HBO or Showtime.

For about 50 cents a day you can have access to a million songs or so to listen to whenever the mood strikes and at your hearts content!

BUT... is the quality of the music good enough to pipe over your home stereo via your HTPC or whatever Zune adapter MS offers? That depends on who you are. Audiophiles will balk at 128 or 192 bitrate as being worth listening to over a good home stereo. My group prefers our virtual jukeboxes to be all wav or lossless but settle for high bitrate mp3's ourselves...but many people just don't care about the difference.

Now the catch... most service, and I assume MS's will as well, will require whereever you store you music (mp3 player, pc) to connect to the net based service at set intervals to insure you are still paying your fees and if not... there goes your music. Which in reality is more than fair.

If you want to keep the music then pay 99 cents per song of better yet, buy the CD and rip it! And yes I know someone out there is thinking just to record the song via the soundcard lol. If yolu think about it like this...

To go out and buy 2000 cd's say at an average cost of $10 means you spend $20,000. If you take that cost and divide it by $15/month you get the equivalent of 1333.33 MONTHS of listening time before buying the CD's becomes 'cheaper'. Thats <B> 111 YEARS </B> by the way! And thats only for 2000 CD's, for about an AVG of say 140-200K songs not the million that yahoo advertises... now if they will have that many songs you want to listen to is another discussion all together. :-)

Anyways, hopefully MS will allow you to share your collection across multiple mediums (e.g a player, a home pc, maybe a second or third player due to a wife or kids).

damnit I thought I posted...
the TIME LIMIT IS ONLY ON SHARED MUSIC,you own the rest of it.

it has a wireless connection to "share" music thos shared files are limted to a amount of palys r a set amount of time a few days.

There is a Zune theme for xp that MS released last week so if you want to get rid of that blue xp theme just google for "zune theme for xp" ,you don't need any special software to apply it as it's an original xp theme,the wallpaper that comes with it is crap but the theme is a nice colour,if you want a selection of free wallpapers for it i usually go to http://www.ceades.net/ or webshots