I saw that on my gamercard, i was lie kwhat are those? Weird album art.....its like the 360 acheivements, at the start i thiought they were weird adn useless..but now im an acheivment additct...my names phil and im an Addict......ok back to work i go.

I see it's time to spin up some old favorites on repeat.  I wonder if I'll be sick of them by then...

OK so maybe I'm crazy but I can't imagine listening to one artist 1000 times in a month.  I go through phases of how much music I listen too but looking at my LastFM stats I can see that in the past 6 months I don't have one single artist I've heard more than 500 times, in fact I haven't listened to more than one song 10 times or more.  I guess I am old school and like albums and variety.

So I wonder outside of young people and attention seekers how many people listen to one artist that much each month, I still think longer term stats are more interesting than this month at a time thing.

@gary

That's why they are gold awards... Ms also made normal awards, wich are less demanding, for normal people who don't leave their zune on 24/7 just to get some weird "archeivement" (i've actually heared some people do that)...

@guardian

So for fun I did the math, to get the gold award if you figure songs on average of 3:45 or so to listen to 1000 songs in a month you would need to listen to that one artist more than 2 hours every single day of the month.

I don't like anyone that much.  But yeah I could see people setting up zune playlists on their computer to make sure they get those totals.

But even the normal awards are not something I will achieve often, guess I leave mine on shuffle too much or shuffle myself, I just usually don't like to over listen to anything.

but I think anytime you have an award you will find people who's sole goal is to show how many they can achieve which is just odd to me.

@gary

Normally i put mine on shuffle to, but i skip to my favorite songs a lot :p.

Now i got 2 awards, see http://social.zune.net/member/beholder333

I have to admit, I love the awards.  I feel like I'm accomplishing something every time I listen to music.  However, I'm definitely not going to work hard by setting up loops to "achieve" a gold award.

One thing I REALLY don't like:

In the article:

"Badges expire if you drastically reduce the number of plays for an album or artist."  You can't take XBox360 achievements away.. why can these badges expire?  Sometimes I am really into an artist and listen to them a lot, and then move on to new artists... why should I lose my award???  I'd much prefer the ability to remove my own badges IF I want.

I totally agree with James.  I would like to remove some badges from when I listend to a few comedy albums, but I guess I'll just have to leave them up for a month.

Also, maybe there should be a podcast badge.  Podcasts don't count towards anything on Zune plays.

Its a damn pitty people anywhere else in the world cant at least have playcount functionality and podcasts.

cheers once again msft.

badges...

we don't need no stinking badges

@Jim

I'm from the netherlands and i've got my zune social account working+marketplace+podcasts. Just download the opera browser (google it) and make a new american live account on it, log out your current live account, acces the zune site and click create account or something. If you've created the account you will be able to acces it through normal internet explorer.

Why are plays by the same artist counted separately?  

See, for example:

Russell Watson:   http://social.zune.net/artistdetails.aspx?aid=53810200-0600-11db-89ca-0019b92a3933

and

Russell Watson:  http://social.zune.net/artistdetails.aspx?aid=35710000-0200-11db-89ca-0019b92a3933