What’s a song-squirt? It’s the first, and currently the only, application of the wireless connectivity built into every Zune. Squirting is a tune-sharing feature that works like this: with built-in Wi-Fi, your Zune can alert you to every other Zune within 10 meters, to which you can then send a song (or a podcast or a photo). If the potential recipient accepts the tune, in 10 or 15 seconds it’s in his or her Zune.
The catch is that the squirt is fast-drying–in three days it goes away. Or, if the recipient plays it three times within that period, it evaporates after the third spin. This is because Microsoft cut a lousy deal with the record labels, which still regard innovative digital schemes as potential piracy threats. My guess is that people will be turned off because the songs expire so quickly.
Robbie Bach, in charge of the Zune group at Microsoft, calls squirting “a really good first step,” indicating that the company plans to introduce other wireless functions to the device. Zune product manager Scott Erickson describes possibly allowing a concert performer to send a song to every Zune in the audience.
But perhaps the best immediate use of Wi-Fi might be taking a page from Apple’s iTunes, which lets computer users on a network, or within close range via Wi-Fi, look at each other’s music library. There is an insatiable need to know “What’s on your iPod?” It turns out that we really do make judgments about other people–and even have attractions triggered–based on what they listen to. Proof comes from recent studies by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his colleagues on “the role of musical preferences in interpersonal perception.”
Spontaneously browsing a nearby music collection could result in any number of fascinating outcomes. How cool would it be to sit in a subway or take a break in a gym and check out the contents of the nearby music players, then try to visually identify the Miles Davis fan, the Ramones rocker and the Barry Manilow sentimentalist? It would be the ultimate social icebreaker–or, for those with woeful tastes, a deal breaker.
My guess is that sooner or later, Apple will get Wi-Fi into iPods. In the meantime, allowing us to wirelessly expose ourselves in a musical sense could be a big win for Microsoft. We’d all be asking, “What’s on your Zune?”
