Microsoft announces that Zune users will be able to access the Zune music store for free from 9,800 U.S. McDonalds, care of Wifi provider Wayport. Users can wirelessly stream and download music, tag and purchase songs directly from the built-in FM radio and access personalized music recommendations and programming.
That’s a nice feature for the 2 million or so Zune users out there. Most of the 163+ million iPods that have been sold can’t download music from the Internet. If this thing worked on a Mac, I’d start using it as a large-drive player backup to my iPhone. iPhones have saturated the market to the point where consumers looking to differentiate themselves may just be looking for something else to play their music. I don’t think this McDonalds deal is going to be the reason Zune starts to see market share gains, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Zune, or the new Dell Zing, became popular anti-Apple favorites.