Trying out Rhapsody

The economics of owning an iPod are finally getting to me. I collected a list of 30 artists/discs I wanted to try out recently, and it would have cost me like $300-500 to get all their cds, a lot of time to rip them, and then I might have liked only 20% of the music. So I decided to try one of the subscription services and settled on Rhapsody for random reasons.

After 48 hours of use, the pros:

• they had all the artists I was interested in.
• almost all of the music is downloadable to one of their supported music players. Only exception I ran into was Tom Petty’s greatest hits Cd
• there are a variety of players available, many that are available as cheap refurbs.

The cons:

• If rhapsody hits any problem at all, it just fails silentlly and confusingly. In my case, I stored my library files on a network server and the server had gone toes up. this totally confused the rhapsody player.
• another example – I had an old samsung flash mp3 player that I tried to load up with music. this particular player is not able to support the rhapsody-to-go drm and so I was unable to place music on it. the error messages around this were massively confusing.

I can’t say I am a convert yet but I suspect I will stick with Rhapsody for a while as a way to trial music. If I decide to purchase I will go buy the Cds.

I have to say – if the iPod economics are so unfriendly that they drive a guy in my socioeconomic strata to try out alternatives – well this doesn’t bode well for Apple in the long run. Apple is going to have to come up with a subscription offer.