I’m in love with the Rhapsody music service. A friend was having a birthday party and wanted “old-style lounge music” by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, and a couple of other crooners. We typed these names into Rhapsody and it made us a custom radio station playing songs by these folks. With one username/password it is possible to run Rhapsody on multiple computers, so I plugged my laptop into a stereo and we had the desired music for the entire party. So painless that you’d wonder why anyone would want to collect, inventory, and manage a music collection from iTunes or on physical media (unless you are a sound quality snob, in which case SACDs are nice).
Rhapsody is also good for serendipitous discovery of new music. Today, for example, I stumbled upon a track by “Nitty”. Rhapsody describes him as follows:
Nitty makes family-friendly rap music that can be enjoyed by little kids and older listeners alike.
The first sentence of his song (for little kids) contained the words “nigga” and “fuck”.
you’d wonder why anyone would want to collect, inventory, and manage a music collection from iTunes or on physical media
Well, a) because Rhapsody (and Yahoo music) is only available in the US and b) the other service (Napster) only works on Windows.
Personaly, I think of the two as complementary services. I like actually owning (whatever that means these days) the music I like. But your friend’s birthday party is an excellent example of the value of the subscription services too.
I like Rhapsody too.
It’s cool.
I wonder how many regular iTunes Store users are such because of the various Pepsi/iTunes promotions.
Several years ago, I used iTunes itself on my Macintosh, but neither used the online store (just ripped CDs) nor did I drink much Pepsi. One day I happened to buy a Pepsi and happened to win a free iTunes song. So I gave it a try, and was much impressed with how easy it was to get individual songs that I wanted online rather than buying whole albums on CD.
I ended up becoming a regular (although not frequent) iTunes Store user, and started drinking more Pepsi.
Yeah, they got me on that one. 🙂
You just aren’t down wit’ Nitty on the East Side, are you Philip?
A new kid on the free diy online radio station scene is Pandora (www.pandora.com), an offshoot of the Genome Music Project. They make no claims about kid-friendly rap.
I did find out today that if you skip too many songs in an hour they’ll make you listen to whatever comes up next because some kind of licensing requires them to.
“…So painless that you’d wonder why anyone would want to collect, inventory, and manage a music collection from iTunes or on physical media…”
“…The first sentence of his song (for little kids) contained the words “nigga” and “fuck”…”
Doesn’t the second answer the first? Ownership is about control. If I control the music mix, no nasty suprises lurk in my playlist, but I have to put in the effort to build the playlist. It’s a trade-off.