Zune - The battle of the portable music player

Microsoft put out a press release yesterday announcing that they had made a deal with Universal with regard to sales of it's new portable music player - "Zune".

Supposedly Universal will get a flat fee amount for each unit that is sold and the other major labels are said to be keen to make similar deals with Microsoft.

Considering that in April/May this year Apple/iPod refused to work with the major record labels with regard to setting fees for tracks, (Apple have a flat-fee per track system, and the labels wanted to introduce a system where the newest most popular songs sell for a higher price than the older back-catalogue tracks).

Now that Microsoft have gone to the other extreme and are now working directly with the record labels, it will be interesting to see where this battle ends up.