A day ahead of an Apple announcement (some think a subscription service is on its way), news about updates to Microsoft's Zune are appearing online. Matt Rosoff at Digital Noise knows Microsoft very well and has a good post on the new features: 120GB capacity, ability to access Zune Store via WiFi hot spot, FM song tagging and integrated genre channels.

Nice improvements, but at its best the Zune device depends on the Zune Pass subscription service. Like Rhapsody and Napster, Zune Pass is going to have a hard time finding a large audience.

By the way, I canceled my subscription to Zune Pass a few months ago and I don't miss it (I had either Rhapsody or Zune for about four years). Between free streaming at Lala.com, my regular music purchases, 65 songs a month at eMusic, the occasional bargain album at Amazon.com, a hard drive filled with music and a few thousand CDs in my collection, I already have enough music. Paying for instant access to five million (or whatever) songs isn't worth it. That's a shame for subscription services, because a music junkie like me is a target customer.