The Zune Pass is one of the greatest things I have encountered in the nineteen years of my life. While some may argue the financial value or the overall values of a subscription model, the Zune Pass is a well thought-out and useful product, as long as you aren't tied to another device through DRM'ed purchases or buy having non-Windows computer.
For $15 a month, the subscriber gets access to what I believe is the entirety of the Zune Marketplace. For a very long time I did not perceive the value with it because I would only download a handful of songs every once and a while. However, they changed the plan so that each month you can pick 10 songs that you want to keep, even if you end your subscription. They made it easy to perceive it as being only $5 a month, keeping in mind that the average song is $.99. It worked.
Like I mentioned in the Zune software entry, the software has a lot of hooks that make having the Zune Pass a good idea and add convenience to the software. For instance, if you have the Zune Pass, if you want to preview a song, you get to hear the whole song versus a 30-second clip. The SmartDJ will allow you to let it create playlists from just Zune Marketplace songs or a mix of what's on your computer and Zune Marketplace songs.
The interesting thing about the Zune Pass and the biggest issue with Microsoft's advertisement for it is that you really only perceive the value of it once you try it. It may be worth their time to let customers try it for a month and even give customers the free 10 songs. They could attach the trials to the the Zune Tag which would be required to be attached to a credit card so they would not have to worry about abuse.
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