As MP3 music players are replaced by smart phones, and oldie but a goodie is returning.

Remember the early days of Zune? One feature that really stood out was the capability to download playlists and "mixtapes" from the Zune music store.

That feature got lost with the switch to Windows Phone and the rebranding of Xbox Music. 

You could sometimes find some good store-generated playlists if you did a search, but they were never easy to find in the Windows Phone Store. 

Now, check out the "Top Playlists" section in the Windows Phone 8 Store's Music section. 

If you haven't been keeping up. Xbox Music Pass, is Microsoft's renaming of their old Zune Music Pass cloud music service that's been around for over six years.  The new service is almost identical, except a few old features have been removed, but a few new features have been added. 

Xbox Music Pass includes several features, many of which should compete nicely with other popular cloud music services.

Zune Pass has always had unlimited streaming of all music available in the marketplace on wireless Zune players, Windows Phones 7/8, desktop Zune software, and the web browser as long as you were signed in with a Microsoft Account (Live ID) that had the subscription enabled. 

Xbox Music Pass no longer supports the web browser at this time, but we think that feature will be returning once the web-based music marketplace is back online.  You can stream full songs from the entire Xbox Music collection as long as you're a subscriber.  This is very similar to Spotify where you simply search for the music you like and press play to listen to it.

You can find playlists within each genre now. It's easy to start playing each playlist with your Xbox Music Pass and you can tap and hold each song to download it to your device, but there is no easy way to download an entire playlist or add it to your cloud collection, yet.  The only tap and hold option is "Pin to Start".