What would a day on CrunchGear be like without at least one totally unconfirmed but juicy rumor? Our spies are going into overtime as the deadline for the Zune approaches (that’s November 14, chuckleheads). Though this is something we’ve heard before, we’ve now got a second source that independently mentioned the same idea, which gives us a clue to it having some weight: spiffs for song sharing.
We know that the zinger for the Zune is the social networking/music sharing features. Briefly, it works thusly: if we have a song on my Zune we like, we can send it to your zune via WiFi. You can listen to the song three times for free within a 3 day window, then it will prompt you to pay for it ($1), lest it disables itself. If you do pay for the song we shared with you, then we would get a credit for turning you onto the song. Once we have enough credits, we can cash them in for free songs or other items from the Zune Marketplace. So it suits us to share, share, share. It’s sort of a backwards pyramid marketing scheme.
Now it’s unconfirmed exactly how many credits you’d need, as we have no real details – just the idea behind it – but it’s a novel take on music sharing that really encourages people to leave their WiFi on their Zune powered up, which is going to be the key of the DAP’s success.