The “Free access” is for Windows 8 PC's or tablets and it comes with ads (of course). Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 360 users will have a 30 day trial period or they can continue to use the already available subscription model found in Zune Pass. Zune pass will become Xbox Music Pass in Xbox Music and will cost $10 per month or $100 per year. Notice that this is all for Windows 8; Microsoft has not said anything about bringing Xbox Music to older versions of Windows. However users of the Zune client will still be able to use the service with some limitations like not being able to sync their playlists over the cloud.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Xbox 360 does not have multitasking; which means that you won’t be able to play music and play games or do anything else at the same time (pretty stupid if you ask me), but maybe they make this work in the future, who knows. Xbox music will be available to Xbox 360 users starting tomorrow, Windows 8 users from 26th October and The Windows Phone 8 version will come shortly after. This surely won’t be any significant improvement for Windows 8, but maybe they will get a few more users who like their multimedia services, or want to use Xbox360 as a media player.
[Ed – Microsoft’s discovery is somewhat outdated although it is clear they would like to combine the features of Netflix, iTunes, Zune, Pandora and others into a single service that is hosted by Microsoft. One thing that will make or break the service is content. If Microsoft cannot provide good and current content to users the service will fail even if it is free to Windows 8 owners. That is just the sad fact of it and is one of the reasons that the Zune music service did not do as well as it could have despite the ability to download all the music you wanted for free. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has created another also ran with their new streaming services or if they will actually be used by people instead of the services which they most likely already have…]
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