Building a "Cool Zune" Community: Not an easy task for Microsoft!

Microsoft was turned down by the popular music website. In an attempt to boost the cool factor of the Zune, Microsoft wanted help from the trendy blog for developing content for their Zune to Zune sharing community.

"They asked us about generating new content with them or creating a new section on our site specifically for Zune visitors, but it wasn't something we were interested in pursuing," Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Ryan Schreiber told The New-york Post.

"It wasn't anything political, and I don't want to sell Microsoft or the Zune short," Schreiber said. "But the idea just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us."

We can believe that Pitchfork is not totally against Microsoft as Zune advertisements are currently running on the popular website...

The Wi-fi feature of the Zune and its ability of sharing content between users is a great feature. But a hardware feature like this one does not make a community on its own. Zune users need better incentives to adhere to a Zune community. A partnership with a blog like Pitchfork would have make sense for Microsoft but a large corporation like that can’t make that kind of partnership with alternative communities without destroying the “alternative” attribute of the site. They will have to approach more popular communities to begin with.

Both Apple and Microsoft knows that the future of the media players is thru “discovery of content”. Apple may wants to do it by grabbing content from radio and Microsoft want to build a community of users exchanging content wirelessly.

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