Saturday, April 19, 2003
An Internet Music Plan I Can Live With
Posted by Brad Adrian in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 05:00 PM
http://www.listen.com/roadrunner/
I know we've talked about music digital rights management a lot and we've discussed the ethics of using services like Napster, Morpheus and Kazaa ad nauseum, but here's a new wrinkle. To me, the temptation to download unlicensed music always came down to the fact that existing schemes for buying music online suffer from one or more major shortcomings:
• The selection of artists and tunes stinks.
• I have to buy a whole CD just to get a couple of tunes I like.
• Purchased tunes are locked and cannot be copied.
Well, today, I discovered the Rhapsody service from my high speed ISP, RoadRunner. If you've heard of this already, forgive me, but this program comes the closest of any plan I've seen yet to overcoming these limitations. It might even make a more honest person out of me...
I've always said that I'd willingly pay up to $1.50 per tune if I could buy an entire CD filled only with songs that I like. And that's pretty close to what Rhapsody makes possible. Here's basically how it works...
• First, you have to buy a subscription to the service, which is $9.95 per month. I'm not really nuts about this part, but if I plan to create at least a few CDs a month, it's worth the subcription price to me. For this fee, you get unlimited listening access to over 300,000 tracks from over 10,000 artists, including everybody from Eminem to U2 to ZZ Top.
• Second, you build playlists of music by searching the databases by artist, track, album or composer. This part is trickier than it sounds, though, because the incredible selection makes it hard to whittle down the list to something manageable.
• Third, you burn a CD with your playlist selections. This step costs $0.95 per track. The process is fast and easy, and you can even then rip the songs to MP3 format for listening on a Pocket PC.
With this program, I was able to create a custom CD of hard-to-find tunes in just a few minutes. I don't have any problem paying for each song, either, because it's a lot better than buying a whole slew of CDs just to get the 11 songs I really wanted.
Oh, in case you were wondering, the songs I was so eager to find included such gems as:
China Grove
Black Water
Steamer Lane Breakdown
Listen To The Music
...and 7 more.
[Two brownie points to the first person who knows what band recorded all these songs...]
I know we've talked about music digital rights management a lot and we've discussed the ethics of using services like Napster, Morpheus and Kazaa ad nauseum, but here's a new wrinkle. To me, the temptation to download unlicensed music always came down to the fact that existing schemes for buying music online suffer from one or more major shortcomings:
• The selection of artists and tunes stinks.
• I have to buy a whole CD just to get a couple of tunes I like.
• Purchased tunes are locked and cannot be copied.
Well, today, I discovered the Rhapsody service from my high speed ISP, RoadRunner. If you've heard of this already, forgive me, but this program comes the closest of any plan I've seen yet to overcoming these limitations. It might even make a more honest person out of me...
I've always said that I'd willingly pay up to $1.50 per tune if I could buy an entire CD filled only with songs that I like. And that's pretty close to what Rhapsody makes possible. Here's basically how it works...
• First, you have to buy a subscription to the service, which is $9.95 per month. I'm not really nuts about this part, but if I plan to create at least a few CDs a month, it's worth the subcription price to me. For this fee, you get unlimited listening access to over 300,000 tracks from over 10,000 artists, including everybody from Eminem to U2 to ZZ Top.
• Second, you build playlists of music by searching the databases by artist, track, album or composer. This part is trickier than it sounds, though, because the incredible selection makes it hard to whittle down the list to something manageable.
• Third, you burn a CD with your playlist selections. This step costs $0.95 per track. The process is fast and easy, and you can even then rip the songs to MP3 format for listening on a Pocket PC.
With this program, I was able to create a custom CD of hard-to-find tunes in just a few minutes. I don't have any problem paying for each song, either, because it's a lot better than buying a whole slew of CDs just to get the 11 songs I really wanted.
Oh, in case you were wondering, the songs I was so eager to find included such gems as:
China Grove
Black Water
Steamer Lane Breakdown
Listen To The Music
...and 7 more.
[Two brownie points to the first person who knows what band recorded all these songs...]
