Can a junkie score with Zune? - Part 1.

I'm like a coke fiend when it comes to music. I'll go on weeklong benders where I blow through piles of music to score a new song, my next favorite album, my latest (and short lived) aural obsession. Once I find a fix I'll run it dry and then move on to the next score. Like an addict, the longer you do this, the more intense the need. I'm a music junkie.

I'll venture to guess that I'll go through more music in a month than most do in a year. I know that I'm not the only one with this problem. There are a lot of music junkies out there. It's a life-long habit we've grown (or are growing) into. We were the kids at the record store every day, at the shows every weekend, walkman never off, all day Sunday matinee making mix tapes at night. There's a movie, High Fidelity, that's (mostly) about this, about growing up to be an adult having a music obsession. Either you love the movie or you hate it. If you love it you know why – you are a junkie too..

Because I am a music junkie, I have hard time feeling satisfied with the music services that are available today. There's no one package that delivers what you need to find, sample, "buy", organize and port music. After years of trying just about every service and combination of devices, apps and sites, I've resigned myself to having to use more than one service to get everything I need. There are actually quite a few that I use and I've even been pairing this down recently. I've narrowed my quiver to the following – Rhapsody, Zune + Zune Pass, i-Pod + ITunes, Pandora (via MSN Radio), MySpace, WinAmp + Shoutcast and an assortment of Podcasts.

For most who are just content with i-Tunes this probably seems unnecessary. But, if you are serious about music, about finding new music and sharing it, about consuming mass quantities of widely diverse music, about satisfying a music habit, i-Tunes doesn't really cut it. So I keep looking for the best way to handle this. My ultimate goal is to get this down to one, which (in the spirit of being a supportive employee at MSFT) I hope will be Zune. Since I know most people can't sit through a 10 page blog post I'm going to break this up into a 7-part series where I'll go through the five main functions of "the habit" – finding, sampling, "buying", organizing and porting and contrast Zune with the other services I use. I'll wrap it up with a final section on how it all stacks up. I'm looking forward to some comments

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