In their latest attempt to buy underground street cred for their Zune music player, Microsoft approached record-store hipster bible Pitchfork to set up a Zune section on their website where hipsters could use the player's proprietary technology to post reviews and content (all under the umbrella of Microsoft's DRM, of course), and hopefully serve as opinion leaders for making the DRM-crippled, ultra-proprietary piece of crapware synonymous with indie cool as much as the spammy wasteland of MySpace has become with cutting-edge unsigned bands. Pitchfork said no.
"Pitchfork's audience looks at that site like it is the Bible," said one high-level music industry executive. "They might not take too kindly to a Microsoft pop-up on the site or a relationship with such a big corporation."
But Schreiber shot down that rationale. "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."
There is still hope for Microsoft: they have trashy celebrity tabloid "legendary indie™ bible" NME onboard. That should give them the not-too-sharp end of the indie-kid spectrum at least.

Posted by: datakid | | Tue Oct 24 23:25:31 2006

You are telling me you are not interested in getting one to install linux on... I know I am

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Wed Oct 25 11:15:14 2006

I imagine it's sufficiently resistant to economic terrorism (i.e., unauthorised modifications) that doing so would involve a lot more hardware kung-fu than I have.

Then again, I haven't even bought an XBox. Mostly because spending money on a big ugly machine I won't have much practical use for outweighs the momentary pleasure of cocking a snook at Darth Gates' Evil Empire.

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