In what could have been a Festivus miracle if it didn’t involve downloading a Windows app, Microsoft is offering 100 pretty decent records for free through their Music Deals app. The list of artists available for the cost of trying to figure out how to get the stupid app to work includes Kanye West, Mumford And Sons, Rihanna, Katy Perry, DJ Shadow, The Decemberists, Chvrches, Lana Del Rey, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, among others.
The albums are downloaded as DRM-free MP3 files, which means you can port them to other devices, including your beloved iPhone, but using Music Deals to download them requires the app to roll over to Microsoft’s Xbox Music, the successor to the late Zune music marketplace. Unfortunately, to get Xbox Music, you need Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8, so you won’t be able to grab this deal on your parents’ dusty old Windows XP laptop while you’re home for the holidays.
While 100 free albums is a solid prize, there’s a solid chunk of the music-listening population who would rather just use streaming services to rock out to Let It Bleed and who illegally downloaded Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne weeks before it was actually released, meaning this deal probably only means something to a handful of Windows 8-loving Microsoft groupies. But those groupies will still be able to listen to Slippery When Wet in the event that Jon Bon Jovi pulls a Taylor Swift and yanks his catalog from Spotify, so this might still be a boon for digital doomsday preppers.