The Zune marketplace is the place where for certain amounts of money, Zune customers can,online, purchase and download songs and music videos for use on their Microsoft Zune player. The marketplace has been growing steadily since its inception.

The Zune marketplace provides millions of songs as well as music video’s available for purchase. The store’s content is constantly expanding as Microsoft adds songs from both the major record companies as well as content from smaller labels. Microsoft’s goal is to have as large and as diverse of a marketplace as they can manage.

The Microsoft Zune marketplace works off of a system called Microsoft Points. This is the same point system that enables users to purchase content with their X-Box 360s in the X-Box 360 online marketplace. The way it works is that a user purchases a unit of Microsoft points, either with a credit card or by buying a preloaded card from a store. That card is then redeemed through the marketplace interface for “Microsoft Points”. The amount works out the $5.00 per 400 Microsoft points. When you translate this into actual cost per song it amounts to in the neighborhood of$.99 per song. This is a very similar rate to those being offered by other pay for purchase download systems of music that are available online.

The Zune Marketplace allows you to burn songs that you have downloaded through your Microsoft Points to CD. The songs are for all intensive purposes yours to do with as you please at that point. There is a different way to access the marketplace however, where for a monthly fee you will receive unlimited downloads of certain content. This content however will not be able to be burned to a CD. If you allow that membership to lapse the downloaded content will become non –functional.

No online music marketplace will be created now without drawing the inevitable comparison to iTunes. The Microsoft Zune marketplace manages to stand nicely on its own however drawing from the format of using Microsoft points that has its origins in the X-Box marketplace. The good thing about this is that it gives people the flexibility of acquiring Microsoft points from a variety of sources and spending them as they please. The Zune marketplace is a constantly growing and expanding online music marketplace. It has also expanded into video and will surely continue to do so in the future.