Online Music Service (and when to ditch my iPod)

As a music lover and music maker, I constantly look for ways to listen to as much new music as possible (and legally so that the artists get paid!) Satellite radio certainly sounded exciting to me but my initial impression was so-so. While there are lots of free or paid radio available online, this article is about "music on demand," i.e., services that allow me to pick songs to listen to.

The most successful digital music store is, no question, Apple's iTunes Music store, but the fact that it restricts the purchased music only playable on iTunes and iPod does not bode well with me, not to mention $0.99 a song seems too expensive to me (see the side note at the end of this article) Even though I own an iPod, I don't want my purchased music to be tied to it.

Although its nature is very different to iTunes Music store, Real's Rhapsody is an indirect competitor IMO. All-you-can-listen-online costs $10 a month. Ideal for people glued to a PC 75% of the time when they are awake, like myself. Although "downloading" the songs (burn to CD then re-rip) is troublesome and costs you extra, technically speaking, you could digitally "record" the stream and thus get the songs free. That's a lot of work to "build a library" though. Their audio quality are praised over others like Napster and of course, XM satellite radio.

The new Napster-to-Go has make a splash in tech news because of its unique "renting music monthly" model. For $15 a month you could download as much as you want and listen to them as long as you continue paying the monthly fee. At a first glance it sounds totally counterintuitive to normal spending habit on music, i.e., paying a couple dozen $ to buy a few CDs per month and you own them for life and pay no more. However, if you think of it as a radio-like service (think Rhapsody), $15/month for unlimited rotations in your playlist chosen by yourself that you could bring with you anywhere you go is actually a pretty decent deal, especially for music addict like me. Their ad is kinda exaggerated but they do have a point. The downsides are: 1) Napster's selection is not that great compared to others according to some 2) their software works with Win XP only so my Win2K and Mac OS X machines are out of luck. 3) if you are taking your portable device out on a trip that lasted more than a month without sync-ing to your PC, your playlist is nothing more than a lengthy dead silence. Nevertheless, this model is in the right direction for digital music IMO. I'll check it out once I ditched my iPod.

On a side note: I found it interesting that Apple removed the claim that iTunes is "fair to the artists" from their website after people like those from Downhill Battle has pointed out artists were treated just as unfairly as CD sales "despite huge new efficiencies created by internet distribution --no CDs to make, no distributors to store and ship them, no CD stores to build and run"