When Xbox Music -- goodbye, Zune Marketplace -- launches on your 360 on October 16, the ad-supported streaming service will debut globally with a song library of 30 million, 18 million of which will be available instantly for United States users on a free or subscription-based basis. The catch (of course there’s a catch!) is that Xbox Music is a fantastic application for a very specific kind of person.

Loading

Beyond the broad scope of “the music lover,” Xbox Music is built with the Microsoft fanatic in mind, someone committed to the idea of owning Windows 8, a Surface slate, and a Windows Phone. Ironically, no matter what the name implies, the person Xbox Music is engineered against is the Xbox 360 owner.So, it’s October 16, you’re an Xbox owner, and you want Xbox Music’s free tunes. You love the idea of streaming Pixies, Black Keys, Boston, Bruce Springsteen, and obscure Canadian artists like Plumtree, Imaginary Cities, and Michael Bernard Fitzgerald. You happen to have impeccable taste, as it turns out. Here’s how it goes down:You must be an Xbox Live Gold subscriber. From there, you can build playlists and stream all the Weezer and Lana Del Rey you please for 30 days, ad-free, after which you’ll punch in your credit card number and start paying the $9.99 fee to become a Pass member. To become a full-fledged Xbox Music user, you’ll need to pay $60 for Xbox Live Gold and another $120 for Music per year.If you’re keeping score, that’s nearly $200 per year simply to have access to Xbox Music on your Xbox.Ouch. You can commit to a year up front for a discounted $100 per year Pass fee, however.Windows 8 is the only platform on which you’ll be able to stream unlimited music for free – and for the time being, Microsoft says there’s no ceiling on the number of tracks you can listen to. Better still, you can skip as many junk tunes as you want. Take that, Spotify.Microsoft isn’t buying much more goodwill with the majority of its audience, though, especially those who’d likely want to use Xbox Music most. Want to use SmartGlass? It won’t be available just yet. Surface? Also unavailable at launch. Oh, you’re an Android or iOS user? Sorry, support for those devices is coming “within a year.”Even PC users need to wait for Windows 8’s launch on October 26 to take full advantage of the program. The only user who can use Xbox Music out of the gate is the one who gets the raw deal.Of course, this is a short term problem. Look ahead six months or so. Assume Xbox Music is on your iPad and iPhone and Windows 8 has any launch kinks straightened out. You've adopted a new operating system or tablet and they can all talk to each other. The cloud is great for shooting tracks between devices. In the near future, Xbox Music will be excellent -- possibly outdoing its competition at every corner. It has the edge over competitors like Grooveshark, Pandora, and Spotify because it shares similar features (Smart DJ is your radio), plus it adds Vevo-powered music videos and Pass members can download albums for free. And if you’re streaming on your phone you shouldn't have any interruptions – progressive downloading stores the song without saving it to your device, allowing you to listen to tracks on your tunnel-filled commute even if you lose signal.But will this be enough to create an audience out of built-in Xbox users as well as tear the Spotify- and Pandora-obsessed away from what’s working already? At launch, probably not. Looking ahead a year, though, and this could be the one and only music service we need.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. As a Canadian, he appreciates Microsoft launching Xbox Music in the motherland. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN