Zune Marketplace goes live in Canada for a flash, then disappears

And people say that nothing interesting happens on Friday. We’ll prove them wrong.

The lovely Zunited blog noticed something recently that might have unveiled the future of Zune, and demonstrated that it in fact has a future.

Late at night, just a hair off midnight, while using the dev/beta version of Zune (that can interface with a Mangoed WP7 handset, we use the same edition here at TNWmicrosoft), Josh Martin was served, for a short period of time, the full Zune Marketplace in Canada.

Oh yes, it could be that America’s hat is about to get the Zune marketplace.

Why does that matter? Because it implies that Zune is not dead, something that we have been tracking by the month, as there have been very strong signs that the brand will eventually be wrapped up and placed under the Xbox aegis and forever forgotten. Standalone Zune hardware is already over, but it seems that the software side of Microsoft’s music service has legs.

One of the largest issues that Windows Phone has to face is that its music service, Zune, is very constrained in terms of where and how it can sell music. In other words, as Microsoft can’t sell music everywhere that it can sell phones, certain countries get a bum deal. With Canada online, assuming that this test was a preparatory experiment, WP7 sales could tick up a notch.

And they need to.