14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft rolled out the Xbox Music service on its Xbox 360 console today, while Windows 8 platforms will get it on October 26.
Windows 7 users on the other hand won’t receive the new service at all and will have to stick to the old Zune client, Microsoft officials confirmed.
Xbox Music is exclusively designed for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 360, so this means that Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 users have no other choice than to rely on the same Zune client as before.
“Windows 7 will still have the old Zune client. That client will have access based on the subscriptions and the content that anyone purchased and that content can flow forward to Windows 8 but we're not touching that client just now,” Jerry Johnson, general manager of Xbox Music, was quoted as saying by The Verge.
While they will get access to the same music collection as Xbox Music consumers, Windows 7 users will lack key features such as playlist cloud synchronization.
What’s more, Microsoft will introduce cloud storage features in Xbox Music in 2013, but they won’t be available for Windows 7 users.
“It's a very different feature set but you'll have access to the same content,” Johnson added in a public statement, trying to explain that Windows 7 users won’t lack too many goodies.
“We're not going to update the [Windows Phone 7 client]. There might be some iconography upgrade from what I've seen but it will continue to be a Zune product because it's not going to take on the Zune features we're going to walk through today.”