The embedded album art on Zune Marketplace tracks was 200x200 or 240x240 pixels, too small and not of the best quality always. The new tracks have updated Album Art, good quality 800x800 pixels photos, a real pleasure. But the album art looks also better on the Zune player which is very important. See below some before-after photos and a another small change on the "Find Album Info" system...

These are photos I took from my Zune Player with the old album art (left column) and with the new (right column). Click on the thumbnails to view them in full detail (6 MP):

Check also my flickr account for other photo resolutions if 6MP it's too big for you. 

As you can see the quality even on Zune is better now. A member of the ZuneRama forum has noticed artists removed and added again in the Marketplace, probably to update their Album Art. Also the new tracks I tested are bigger by 70-250 kbytes.

The procedure I used to update them is deleting them from my library the PC, log in the Zune Marketplace,  go to "Account Management" and "Restore Library". This way you can redownload (without paying) a track up to 4 times.

But thats not the only update on the Zune Marketplace, the "Find Album Info" system (right click a track in the Zune Marketplace to see it) has changed. It now uses the shopformusic Microsoft's store: http://shopformusic.microsoft.com/Shop/Shop.asp

This must be an store, called XPshop and when you click to buy an album it just send you over to MSN Music (isn't it dead?) or Rhapsody. It doesn't look to be Zune related anyway.

Below it's a snapshot from the Zune Marketplace "Find Album Info" menu. As you can see it is multilanguage and it recognized my Windows have Greek locale:

I hope someday Zune will get multi-language support too.

[ZuneRama forum via ZuneThoughts ]