Rhapsody
I saw Marc Canter or someone discussing various online music distribution models and dissing Rhapsody the other day. It reminded me, someone should say something positive about Rhapsody now and again. I guess I'm that someone today.
I've dabbled with iTunes, I looked at BuyMusic it's pretty much the same, I've looked for the odd novelty on P2P and mostly I've gone through spurts where I'll work on ripping high-quality mp3s from the hundreds of CDs I've accumulated over the years. Nowadays I'm mostly just listening to Rhapsody.
For me, the pros and cons of each go something like...
iTunes/BuyMusic/et al - Great, I can buy music online and receive it instantaneously. Super, I can do so for a bit less than it costs to buy an equivalent CD. Okay. This is a great way to buy music that you want to own and have something approximating recurring rights with. The convenience and price differences are completely moot, however, once you tell me I can only do certain things with the copy of the music I own. If I can only play it on certain computers or devices (or a limited number thereof), pretty much all the value leaves the equation for me. I'd rather just buy the CD and legally do all the things I want with it into perpetuity. So while online music distibution has racheted up a level due to Apple and Buy.com's entrance, until it gets a lot cheaper or more enabling, I'm still in favor of buying the CD--<b>for music I want to own</b>.
P2P - Go ahead and subpoena me, but I've bought more music in the past decade than anyone wearing a little brown shirt and punching the clock over at the RIAA. Maybe I just wanted to hear 95 South one more time, maybe I wanted to let the dogs out for a few minutes, maybe I just couldn't get It's Hot in Herrrrrrrrrrrre out of my head. It's an impulse thing and maybe with more options coming online I would drop a buck to hear Gerardo or Taco just one more time.
On balance though, at least to me, it's a pain in the ass to actually acquire music over P2P file sharing. Sure, teens and college kids the world over might have more time than money and not be so concerned about sound quality or uniformly tagged tracks (to say nothing of all issues legal and moral). Me, I care about these things, so I really don't look at P2P networks as a way to get the kind of music I want, unless it's an impulse urge to listen to something I would never in good conscience buy.
Rhapsody - It's the only streaming service I've tried, but I flat out love it. Why? Because it lets me find and listen to music I probably wouldn't buy, but that I'd like to listen to--maybe for a week, maybe just for the afternoon. I don't obtain rights to the songs unless I purchase them (and in practice I never buy/burn any of the songs in my library), but there's a hell of a lot of music out there I don't really need those kinds of rights for--just listening to it at the computer works well enough for me.
Caveats: I'm in front of a PC with a solid broadband connection most of my waking hours. As such, the streaming aspect works fine for me, not being able to take it in a car or on a device, isn't what I'm trying to solve here. I am, however, able to listen to thousands and thousands of tracks when at the PC. I've seen others talking about skips and whatnot--it really hardly ever skips for me, maybe once or twice in a whole day of listening.
It's 10 bucks a month. I can find and listen to Ned's Atomic Dustbin. I probably wasn't going to buy another copy of this, I don't know what became of the original. I've never gotten around to ripping the Chess Muddy Waters box set. I heard Longwave is worth checking out from a friend and I did. My copy of the Melvins' Stoner Witch is so banged up, it's never going to rip well unless I give EAC five days to do it. I hate to admit it but I like The Jumpoff by Lil' Kim; but I want to hear the Lost Boyz track it samples/borrows from heavily instead (Jeeps, Lex Coups, Bimaz & Benz [sic^2]).
These are all types of musical urges for which my demand is pretty elastic. I don't expressly need to satisfy any of them, but for 10 bucks a month, I can and that seems like a reasonable price point on my end. So, sure it's not getting any song in the world for a dime in realtime and being able to do whatever you want with it. But it is a compelling experience for the money in my book--in short I believe I'm sold.
As I mentioned, I never actually burn (aka buy) any of my Rhapsody songs. What do I want with a CD anyway? I don't drive, I don't even really use CDs except as a storage medium to keep around until I either rip or need to re-rip. I listen to music almost exclusively on my PC (wired into my stereo at home). For me, Rhapsody is nearly perfect. So I guess it's possible to bemoan the fact that you can't own the songs. Me? I was never going to spend the money on another copy of The Wedding Present's Bizzaro anyway, I'd just like to listen to it a few more times.