And since one of the primary ways that social services grow is through the recommendation of a content shared from friends, colleagues and acquaintances, a paywall can be a serious inhibitor to growth.
I'm also pretty sure I know my friends, and if I am looking for a recommendation on something, I'll hit particular ones up based on what I know of who knows what.
We haven't played enough tracks yet to use the "picks" recommendation feature yet (Microsoft's Genius killer), but we usually prefer the recommendations of friends and critics to cold, heartless pieces of software -- and Zune has had that locked down with the Social for a while now.