The Microsoft Zune Came in Brown

Microsoft's Zune music player came out in November 2006 to take on the iPod. It let you share songs over Wi-Fi, and yes, one of the colors was brown.

current mood: underdogcurrently listening to: ♫ a song shared over Wi-Fi

Written by Natalie Brooks · October 9, 202656k: ~2 min

The Zune was Microsoft's portable music player, and the first one went on sale in the United States on November 14, 2006. It had 30 gigabytes of storage, a 3-inch screen and a feature the iPod didn't have, which was sharing songs with other Zunes nearby over Wi-Fi. It came in black or white, plus a brown color that people still make jokes about. The Zune never came close to catching the iPod, and Microsoft stopped making the players in 2011, but it has a loyal group of fans who still say it was better.

Microsoft takes on the iPod

By 2006, the iPod was everywhere, and Apple's iTunes store sold most of the digital music people bought. If you want the full background on that, there's the first iPod and buying songs on iTunes.

Microsoft wanted a piece of it. The Zune 30 cost $249.99, about the same as a comparable iPod, and it came with a bigger screen than most iPods at the time. It also had its own store, the Zune Marketplace, which opened on November 22, 2006.

At the Seattle launch, Microsoft executive Bryan Lee said "Zune is all about changing the game to make music more social." The pitch was that your music player shouldn't be something you used alone with your headphones in. Everyone else was walking around with white earbuds and a thousand private songs, so this was a hard sell.

How did Zune song sharing work?

Zune song sharing worked over Wi-Fi between two Zunes that were close to each other. You picked a song and sent it to a friend's player. They could play it up to three times within three days, and then it stopped working. They couldn't send it on to someone else, either.

If they liked it, the Zune kept a note so they could buy it later.

The idea made sense on paper. You were at school or on the bus, you heard a song on a friend's Zune and you could take it with you right there. The problem was finding another person with a Zune. Most people had iPods, and the sharing only worked Zune to Zune.

Still, for people who did have friends with Zunes, it was fun. It felt like trading burned CDs, except the songs expired. Picture handing a mix CD to a friend and getting it back blank on Thursday.

Why brown?

The first Zune came in black or white, and then there was brown. Brown was the one everyone noticed. Some people loved it, while others thought it looked like a chocolate bar or something less pleasant. The color became shorthand for the whole Zune, and jokes about it showed up online for years. Microsoft picked a bold one, I'll give them that.

What people tend to forget is that the Zune was actually nice to use. The screen was big, the menus scrolled smoothly, and the software looked different from anything else at the time, with big text and bold colors.

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How many Zunes sold?

Not nearly as many as the iPod: just over 2 million Zunes in total by May 2008. Microsoft sold about 1.2 million of the original Zune 30 between November 2006 and June 2007. In its launch week, the Zune grabbed about 9 percent of the market for music players, while the iPod held about 63 percent. That was a decent start for a brand new product, though it never got much closer. Apple, by comparison, was selling millions of iPods every few months.

The Zune did find its people. Plenty of owners liked that they weren't using the same thing as everybody else, and some liked the Zune software more than iTunes. A Zune in your pocket said you'd made your own choice, for better or worse.

The new Zunes

In October 2007, Microsoft announced a second wave. The Zune 80 held 80 gigabytes and had a 3.2-inch screen, and it came with a touch-sensitive pad for scrolling. There were also smaller flash models, the Zune 4 and Zune 8, with 1.8-inch screens.

In November 2008, Microsoft started Zune Pass, a monthly subscription that let you stream and download as much music as you wanted from a catalog of millions of songs. US subscribers also got to keep 10 songs a month. It was a lot like the music streaming people use now, only years earlier and on a device few people owned.

The day the Zunes froze

On December 31, 2008, many 30 gigabyte Zunes froze at the same time. People turned them on and got stuck on the loading screen. Microsoft explained that a part of the software that kept track of time didn't handle the last day of a leap year properly. The fix was to wait. Once it was January 1 in Greenwich, England, you could let the battery die, charge it back up and it worked again.

It made headlines, and it didn't help the Zune's reputation. It's also a perfect bit of tech trivia to bring out every leap year.

What happened to the Zune?

Microsoft stopped making Zune players in 2011, after years of low sales. The Zune HD, which came out in September 2009 with a 3.3-inch OLED touch screen, was the last new model. Even then, the Zune's share of the market was tiny, about 2 percent in the first half of 2009, compared with the iPod's huge lead.

In March 2011, Microsoft said it wouldn't make new Zune players, and it confirmed in October 2011 that all Zune hardware was done. The Zune name moved over to Xbox Music in 2012, and the Zune music service shut down for good in November 2015.

What people still remember

Getting asked "is that an iPod?" every single time. The squishy click of the Zune pad. Finally finding someone at school who also had a Zune.

The software on the family computer looked nothing like iTunes. Songs from a friend stopped playing after the third listen. One friend still swears by their Zune HD. If you ever carried one of the older players, there's a whole other pocket-sized world in skipping tracks on a portable CD player.

Vote: Would you have bought a brown Zune?

Yes, proudlyorNo, I stayed with the iPod

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Music you share

FriendCrib doesn't make you choose sides. Pick a song for your crib, share it with your friends and let it play as many times as you want. Sign up and post your favorite. If you were the type who recorded everything on a TiVo too, you probably remember the joy of a new gadget that actually did something different.

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