“we see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together” – chris stephenson, leader of zune’s marketing
iPods have taken over America. Or rather, Apple Incorporated has created a vast empire through which only iPods can enter into a discourse with the general public. So popular and common are iPods, that Amazon.com sells only iPods (though it still maintains a subcategory of non-iPod mp3 players). Songs featured on iPod commercials instantly become hits on iTunes, the software of iPods. The “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” commercials have spawned multiple reproductions and spoofs on youtube.com.
In musical culture, there is nothing as synonymous with music in the 21st century as the iPod. It has dominated the field so completely, created such an absolute monopoly, that to be a music listener, means that there are no other options. Any thoughts concerning music must revolve somewhat around the iPod, if not completely be overwhelmed by the discourse enforced by Apple Incorporated. Its message is simple: if you want music, the iPod is the classic way to get it. Evidence for this claim lays in the millions of satisfied iPod owners.
The first time I had ever seen a Zune commercial, it had made no sense to me. It consisted of showing groups of people listening to and enjoying lyric-less music. Since my generation had put down their CD players, the iPod had offered a functional way to listen to music, a method that was quickly adopted by millions of people and spread around the world. Its fame and popularity allowed society to claim it as the mp3 player. Yet the Zune is one of those “other” iPods, and slowly through its use of ads and its stylized appearance, it developed a group of loyal followers who were willing to put down a pop culture icon and wield an mp3 player that speaks more directly to their values and needs. The Zune in this way has set up an insurgent culture. Its ability to do such arises from its design and its functionality, it relationship to its users and its relationship to music, and its ability to be seen differently by different people.
Even at the most superficial level, analysis of the commercials Microsoft wishes to display to a wide potential audience, Zune commercials are different. They are different because they offer a sense of vividness. Not strictly in the traditional sense of vividness with bright, crisp colors, though it also has those features. These commercials put forth audience images that remain at the forefront of their audience's consciousness (Hill). A comparison could be made between Zune commercials and commercials selling perfumes. You see a fragrance commercial and for the first thirty seconds have no idea what is trying to be sold. Your mind attempts to put together a bunch of vibrant images, trying to find a coherent, underlying message. Its message is subversive. What is seen is pleasurable, facilitating a connection to the product if a realization occurs that the product and commercial are joint efforts by the same rhetor.
In Zune commercials after thirty seconds you get a tagline saying, Welcome to the Social. Any individual who is technologically savvy can type in Welcome to the Social on google.com and find out that this catchphrase is directly related to the Zune, a product forwarded by Microsoft. There is a rhetorical constraint here. Only people who can manipulate technology can find out the true meaning of Welcome to the Social. This process culls people who are not worthy of owning a Zune. Even if knowledge of the Zune is obtained, a technological background may be needed to understand why the Zune, rarely talked about or seen, is superior to an iPod. Only those people who are looking for something more will enter into Zune culture. The tagline enhances this idea that there is a revolutionary social group out there, and the commercial centers on people. You see people conversing and listening to music together, in a social setting. There is not just one person listening to music alone. Music is bringing people together. Affect transference of the ideals of the zune takes place within these vivid commercials (Hill). The Zune as it is represented in these commercials allows people to become more social entities within the world of music.
Prior to this music has separated people on two fronts. Listening to an iPod closed off the user from the world, spending time listening to music, unaware of their surroundings. Music proliferation also caused music listeners to break off into sects, staying within their musical genre of comfort. Example, I'm a punk rocker; therefore I only listen to punk. I stay within my confines. Yet the Zune says you can spread out and share music with everyone. What is social about an mp3 player? This idea was unheard of. The Zune is edgy; edgy in the sense that it's at the edge of collective thought surrounding modern music. The insurgent culture that arises thinks the way the Zune allows them to. Music should be used to socialize. Slowly as the Zune takes hold it becomes apparent that there are many ways to share music and the way we contemporarily view music should become more multifaceted.
The newest ad campaign by Microsoft introduces the phrase You Make It You. This slogan seems to contradict the old one. How can it be that this Zune can function as a means of connecting people through a mutual love of music but also posit that individual people, alone, make a Zune the Zune? You can only be part of the social if you take a Zune and you make it your own through interaction. There's many different ways to customize a Zune, working as rhetorical tools that effectively narrow the audience so that one person, through customization, makes one Zune theirs. It is no longer suitable for others and represents its user. While the iPod allows you to buy new cases to change its outward appearance, the Zune allows you to change the very heart of it. The latest generation of Zunes allows you to etch, into the very materials it was created with, beautiful and complex patterns. You can change the background display to a personal picture. You can name your Zune personally. You can upload your own home videos. The iPod held your music. The Zune holds symbolizations of your life, of your dreams, and of your interests. Each individual change shrinks the potential audience making it much more specific to its individual user. The Zune’s added customizability allows it to speak to one person, and one person alone. When its settings have been configured there is a one to one relationship—one person to one Zune.
One of the tenants for living things is that they must somehow interact with their environment. Yet we have seen and will see that the Zune is very interactive. This allows people to envision them with souls. Naming also helps to add to pathos to this relationship. The name of an iPod is rarely disseminated, whereas the name of a Zune frequently appears in its software, making users aware of the fact that it is an individual, not simply just an object. The Zune gains a personality when interacting with users, developing enough ethos to be viewed as a transcendent object. When it is believe that the Zune has a soul then it is easier to see the “correspondence or parallelism [that exists] between the higher realm of spiritual truth and the lower one of material objects”. The Zune moves beyond its identity as a thing; it becomes living.
A one on one relationship with an object is nothing new. It's easy to personify animals, but objects are also fair game. The pet rock phenomenon of the 1970s is a good example of how personal emotions can be connected to something that does not exist and has no emotions of its own. The Zune does this better than a pet rock because a Zune allows for more interactivity. Users can sync up their hopes and dreams within a Zune. This characteristic allows it to have an enhanced ethos and to communicate with the pathos of its users. An illumination of this idea is how the Zune can facilitate a more emotional relationship between people and their music.
Since the beginning of time, things have been rated based on how many stars they receive. Five-star hotels, four-star movies, etcetera. This practice remains in place today, and probably started in ancient Egypt when golden stars could be given to individuals to signify a job-well done (the same practice can be seen in practice in pre-schools across the world). Besides Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down and classy hotel's diamond ratings, stars are generally used to scale how good something is, and the same was applied to music libraries. Windows media player and iTunes made it possible for music listeners to rate their favorite songs, by highlighting how many stars a song should have. Yet the Zune offers another method of rating, which seeks to add a little more emotion. The Zune only has three rating options, and they are linguistically defined by: unrated, I don't like it, and I like it. Just given this information, it is hard to see why this is at all advantageous. It lessens the amount you can appreciate something. You miss out on the discrepancies you might feel for different songs. However, these labels come with icons that actually serve to help individuals visualize their actual relationship with their music. Zune replaces stars with hearts. Users can toggle the setting between a luminous white heart, and a luminous white heart that is severely cracked. These images represent symbols which the audience can take and connect to larger, more emotionally charged matters (Barthes). In this case, love. This connection makes loving music easier, since love’s representation is being placed next to favorite songs.
The idea that a non-living object can influence the way music is viewed is an insurgent one due to its novelty. You could never interact to this extent with anything that came before. This awareness of the Zune as a natural thing allows it to cast a sublime feeling over its audience.
As is common in an iPod dominated world, the Zune is quickly compared to an iPod, but after a few discoveries, it appears that the Zune is in fact not an iPod. For starters we could talk about colors. The iPod for the longest time was an invention divested in monochromicity. Until 2004, with the creation of the iPod mini, color was not even considered by the iPod. Only as recently as September 2007 has the iPod classic switched from white to silver. A slight change perhaps, but a change! When the Zune was released it came in black, brown, and "pearl" white. The types of Zunes purchased can indicate a lot about the ethos of the consumer base. 20% were white, akin to Apple’s iPod. In a place where iPods are dominant, this number should be expected, as some people are still heavily influenced by the simplicity of iPod color choices, but are intrigued by the Zune’s technological differences. 66% of purchased Zunes were black, illustrating the growing numbers of music-philes who like extremes. 14% of Zunes sold, however, were brown. Never has an MP3 player been brown before. It goes without questioning that this is different. It represents an investment by the general public into something new.
But the greatness of the Zune does not rest in its advertisements or its superficial choice of colors. The Zune allows for sharing. It allows interaction with radiowaves and with other Zune owners. Prior to this, the only way to listen to the radio would be to go through a boombox or sit in your car andl listen to your car's radio. Yet the Zune spreads out implicitly, "Music is everywhere, let's tap into that." Music is no longer limited by what's in your computer library. By being able to utilize the radio, music becomes limitless in its expanse to all places on the globe.
Via wireless music sharing, the Zune allows users to send music to other people, increasing diversity of one's musical sources. By taking advantage of Wi-fi, each Zune can effectively “talk” to other Zunes and to computers. Music is no longer confined to one person. Music is for groups of people; anyone willing to share or receive. A free exchange of music appears, not unlike the free exchange of ideas within any enlightenment. The Zune overlaps sharing culture with the already existent musical culture. This is a far superior idea than anything that has come before it.
The Zune has a constitutive nature, changing the way the world can think about music. The Zune has integrated novel programming which helps people see music completely different. As a constitutive object, thoughts concerning the sharing of music have drastically changed since the Zune’s introduction. The Zune is a constitutive force that changes the way users view their reality. The Zune, with its “capacity of symbolic action to affect or constitute perceptions of reality itself” (Cox, 56) changes everything. With the Zune, music exists all around you. You can grab at foreign music by using a radio transceiver, embedded in your Zune’s hardware. You can receive music from a friend. With a subscription, you can add unlimited amounts of songs to your Zune without actual purchase of songs. With the iPod, your music library was finite. You couldn’t change its capacity besides adding or removing songs. The Zune does away with this view of music, and makes the argument, that music should be shared.
The Zune offers a different view of what music is. The iPod placed symbolic legitimacy boundaries on the general public. Music could only be one way. You bought it on iTunes, you synced it onto your iPod, and then you walked around, and everyone had an iPod just like you, listened to it just like you, and everyone was content. The iPod was so overgrown that it had achieved a stage from which it could spew dominant discourse. The Zune says people are inherently different, diverse individuals, but the love of music always should bring people together. An eclectic source of music differs strongly from the iPods attempts at offering music solely from a library.
The Zune is introducing new ideas that will influence what technologies companies invest in in the future. Everything that the Zune forwards into culture, the insurgent idea that music should be shamelessly shared is an antithesis to the iPod. Predictably, future technologies will take advantage of the synthesis of ideas that both the iPod and Zune presented to music culture, and create an even stronger MP3 player that presents a sign of dominant social views.
By exploiting untapped potential in the music market by offering new mechanisms for the interaction of people with music, the Zune has reached commercial success. In 2007 Zunes were the most popular Christmas gift. On amazon.com, which set iPods apart from all other MP3 players due to their massive sales, Zune reached the number one bestseller spot in the audio & video list. This can only show that humans have a curiosity of what is different. Naturally humans thirst to broaden the possibilities of set limits. The Zune with its novel approach to music is an object that breaks through such limits to achieve greater popularity in its field.
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