Last week I wrote an article on Michael Gillett Online about how the Zune team should look to do next to bring the entertainment platform to more people. My main idea was for Zune to provide lots of music, film, etc, information as the first thing searching on Bing as if someone is looking for a specific artist or song they will want to hear it and buy it, well it would appear Bing and Zune were already planning this…or they read my blog and worked bloody quickly to implement it.

My idea for a search is shown below.

When searching for Beyonce in Bing the following page is now displayed.

As you can see above it possible to see the artists songs and albums and its possible to play songs by clicking the play button next to the song name. Currently a pop up appears when clicking the play button however its says the feature is coming soon.

However, and this is a big however, I have not been able to try this feature as what I see is this.

It would appear that this feature is only available where Zune Marketplace exists, I have even tried the search out with Bing set to the US. This new integration would appear to go some way to explaining why the Zune service was offline for most of today and is expected to be officially announced by Microsoft later today as part of a larger announcement.

This is great to see, I am always a big fan of Microsoft integrating its various services and this one makes an awful lot of sense and is another reason why I can’t wait for Microsoft to take Zune global. I’d also like to see Zune provide more info on Bing about TV shows and films.

By the way I don’t want to say I told you so with the new Zune/Bing integration but, well, I told you so which you can read about.

Thanks to Mary Jo Foley and @tromboneforhire for the info and pics.