First of all let me start by saying how true the following statement is:
“iTunes is for people who like certain musicians. Zune is for people who like music.”
Sadly there are very few people who actually like music and most of them like “certain musicians”. However for MS to break into this space I think they are doing the right thing. First build the brand among music enthusiast. I am not sure how successful they have been with that. Anyway I do agree that music discoverability in Zune is much better than iTunes.
Secondly I too face the same problem with Zune pass. There is just so much that I end up downloading a lot of music and then some of them get lost. I think there is a great opportunity for the Zune team to innovate here. There has got to be some features or some way of discovering music from your own library. I would really hate to see them bring back the start rating system to solve this problem. I think there should be some sort of tagging system jut like we do with pictures. Maybe they should start to show “related artist” from ones own library. I really think they can innovate here by making discoverability of music from ones own collection easy and simple.
The Zune 2.5 update was good and I like it so far. It is also great to see two update cycle namely spring and fall. I am wondering what they will add in the next one considering a lot of missing features has been added.