The BBC is reporting that Microsoft’s upcoming Zune portable music player will support sharing of tracks using wireless networking. It’s not clear from this story what kind of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions will be placed on users who share and sample music this way. There’s also no word of whether this wifi sharing and sampling functionality will extend to users of other devices that use Windows Media DRM (such as Creative’s Zen line). It’s also looking unlikely that the Zune will interoperate this way with any future versions of the iPod that support wifi, due to the incompatibilities between Microsoft’s DRM and Apple’s DRM used in iPods.

I’m sceptical about how well this will help Microsoft in their obvious aim of trying to eat into Apple’s dominant market share in the music player and music download market. Microsoft will certainly have to try very hard to not only match the iPod in terms of style and ‘coolness’, but also they will have to convince people to buy from their Zune music store instead of the iTunes Music Store.

That raises the issue of incompatibility – as I’ve said Microsoft’s DRM is incompatible with Apple’s. This essentially means that tracks purchased through the iTunes Music Store won’t be easily transferred to the Zune. Of course, there will be ways to do it (burning a CD won’t usually include the copy protection), but the legality of these is debatable.

Well, all we can do now is to wait for more news to emerge from either Microsoft officially, or other sources. Microsoft say the first Zune players will be released in 2006, with more coming in 2007.