MacDailyNews Take: Real finally gets onto the iPod (the Multi-Touch™ ones, at least) and their product costs $180 per year. Why haven’t music subscriptions taken off again?
Nakashima continues, explaining that music for subscribers “will stream to the device as long as the user is receiving a cellular signal or is in a WiFi hot spot… The songs will be streamed at 64 kilobits per second, which is lower quality than the 256 kbps for songs offered on iTunes, but will help prevent interruptions.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yeesh, AM radio quality (if that) for only $180 per year. It just sounds better and better, doesn’t it?
Nakashima continues, “‘We’re giving you the ability to listen to any song you want. The ones you really like, you can plunk down the extra $1.29 and buy,’ said Neil Smith, vice president of business management for Rhapsody America.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll just keep buying – not renting – tracks in the first place, from iTunes Store, and have them forever, not just for as long as we keep forking over cash to Real every month for 64kbps crap, thanks. No wonder Real, after half a decade of trying, only has some 750K subscribers. This is a very niche app, but having access to some 50 million potential users can obviously only help Real.
Pandora is free. Why do I want to pay $180/year for Rhapsody?
At least this will finally be the definitive test of the subscription music idea. After it fails, we can stop having the same discussion over and over.
No thanks! In case I want to buy the Beatles boxed set, does anyone know how I increase the rate from 128 to 256?
I downloaded it, just to try the free 7 day trial, It says I am now ready to enjoy the service free for 7 days but all it does is keep trying to get you to sign up for the paid service and keeps you in a loop of reentering your login and password and never letting you play a single song. They just blew their chance with alot of customers. Don’t waste your time,
Under Preferences (General), click the button for Import Settings. Change from High Quality (128 kps) to iTunes Plus (256 kps, VBR).
Does Apple get 30% of that $14.99 per month fee?
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It’s ironic that Rhapsody gloms onto Apple in the hope of finding a savior for their service.
[straight face] Personally, I actually prefer the music quality offered by 64 kbps. I’ve advocated it for a long time. [/straight face]
@silverhawk
Thank you! Much appreciated.
The only people that need to get real is Real.
Slacker
Pandora
AOL
Simplify
are plenty for me.
Ooops, I forgot that I dropped AOL and added WunderRadio for locals.
The audio encoder real uses sounds very good at 64 kbps.
I think this great if for no other reason than to finally feed some crow to the crowd that believes that the iPod is a closed environment that is completely locked in to iTunes. While it could be said that you have to use iTunes to manage it, that by no means indicates that it is locking the iPod world up. I’ve thought this in the past and this move seems to reinforce it, iTunes is a gateway to the Apple paradigm of digital living.
EXCELLENT! This is clearly “allowing competitive (HAH!) access to the iPod(touch)”. This will look great when Apple is hauled into court for monopoly/restraint of trade/other … for hogging the business to themselves. Real might even manage a few (thousands? TENS of thousands?) extra customers in the deal. It certainly is less random than searching the FM band for a decent station that MIGHT play a song you want to listen to when in a strange city (with your iPod nano).
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OK, other than the ability to deflect legal criticism and benefitting the not-very-serious “competition” a bit … this helps who how? Oh, right, this is a Good Thing as a Legal Fiction alone.
Horrible!!!
Apple is only allowing it because they know it will fail
So, if Rhapsody is allowed on the Store, how about Firefox combined with Stumbleupon, Adblock and stuff ?
Safari and other weak browsers are NOT good enough.
Wow…can we say cynical and nasty review?
Yes, Rhapsody is $180.00 per year. But then you can listen to just about ANYTHING.
Let’s see Itunes do that.
Sadly, this is the typical childish comments by McD when anything said does not jell with “Mother” .
I can hear children on break shouting at each other.
“My car is better than your car” etc .
Let’s see….
I buy an average of 2 songs a month (averaged from when the iTunes store started) from iTunes and I’ve got virtually everything that I want out of the millions of tracks that they have.
Vs $15 a month to listen to stuff, at lower quality, that I don’t care to listen to?
In my case anyway, subscriptions don’t make any sense at all.
@ken1w
Yes, I was wondering that also, “Does Apple get 30% of that $14.99 per month fee?”
Ya know, we have 4 iPhones in our family … if we could all sign in to the same Rhapsody account and pay only $15 per month for access to 8 million songs … I would consider it.
I’m using the 7 day free trial now … I’ll ask my kids to try and log in while I’m logged in at the same time to see what happens. I doubt it works – and it will be instantly deleted. Worth a try. I would pay $3.75 per month per iPhone though. ($3.75 x 4 iphones)
cleg, you aren’t from around here, are you?
$180 per year buys you about 180 new songs (approximately 10-20 new CDs). I can’t think of ANYONE who bought a new CD every single month, month after month, year after year. Eventually, your collection is quite big, especially since many of those tracks aren’t exactly the best (a few good ones and a lot of filler on your average CD).
As has been argued so many times before, by so many on MDN, music (unlike movies) is something vast majority of people like to OWN (as opposed to rent). Renting movies works well because very few people will watch any movie, even the most favourite one, more than a few times. This explains the omnipresence and abundance of video rental stores (BlockBuster, Hollywood Video, as well as millions of independent ones). A favourite song or album will be played back by an individual many dozens, even hundreds of times over the years. This is why people always liked to own (and not rent) their music (witness the abundance and omnipresence of music CD rental stores… or lack thereof).
There is a small segment of population for whom music subscription service would work well: teens. This group consumes music that has extremely short shelf life. Rather than buying Backstreet Boys, N-SYNC, Jonas Brothers, Cheetah Girls, Hannah Montana (and any future Disney-engineered boy- or girl-band or solo artist) and being stuck with these (likely quite embarrassing) tracks for years after they fade into oblivion, this kind of music would lend itself great to renting. Pay a few hundred bucks in the course of a few years for a few hundred songs that you wouldn’t want to be caught dead with five years later, buy the few songs from actual artists with actual organic (rather than artificially made) music and drop the subscription once you outgrow the teen crap.
This would work if it were the MS (Play-For-Sure, or Zune) model, with some time-bombing DRM and decent (say, 128kbps) bitrate. However, live streaming, at 64kbps, is simply not worth $180 per year. It severely limits where and when you can listen to your music (you can forget the subway, which is where vast majority of iPod and iPhone owners in NYC spend most of their music-listening time).
@rick, “The audio encoder real uses sounds very good at 64 kbps.”
So few words, and yet so much wrong.
I can buy 15 to 20 CDs, or nearly 140 songs on iTunes every year for the price of the Rhapsody subscription. I’ll pass, thanks.
You guys need to get a life.
@ rick,
“The audio encoder real uses sounds very good at 64 kbps.”
Not only that, rick, but if you listen to the same tune twice in a row, you actually get 2 X 64 kbps = 128 kbps which proves that it is just as good as 128 kbps.
dear predrag
My reply:
No, I am not from “around here.” Sadly, I don’t make my home on discussion forums. I live in a house.
You can’t think of ANYONE who bought a new CD ever month? Seriously? Do you know any music lovers? Most of my friends and I bought CD’s by the ton until digital music became the thing. Perhaps you don’t know any music lovers?
So you don’t want to rent music. Fine. So why buy a CD or track, listen to it 5 times and then delete it? Or better yet, why archive it, never to listen to it again? At least with Rhapsody, you can listen to anything unlimited until you decide to buy or delete.
Only teens stop listening to their collections? I have a Dvorak disk I never listen to because I hate the performer. I bought a new one. Diana Krall is great for the first few months, and then the disk gets old. And I have a Naughty by Nature CD from when I was in High School. If you’re still listening to them, I’ll be happy to forward it your way.
Anyway, as the above review neglected (almost certainly on purpose) to point out is that this subscription fee works for the online version, the Ipod version and the software version. For the online and software versions, you get better than CD quality. Believe it or not, this is something useful on more than just the Iphone! You know, there IS life outside the Iphone, right?
I take it you live in New York? I don’t. Me and 300 million other Americans have access to the Iphone, and don’t live in New York. And while I’m sure the very tiny population of New Yorkers with Iphones in the subway is very important to you, I can’t imagine Apple, nor Rhapsody, targeting such a small demographic. Of course, this means that yes, New York subway riders don’t have the loudest voice in the tech debate.
Perhaps it would be fair to feel that even though this wasn’t instituted by Apple, it may not be the worst idea in the world? I love my Iphone and Mac, but let’s face it, Steve Jobs isn’t a Deity, and Apple doesn’t take you to heaven. There is more to life than slanted Mac reviews and close mindedness.
If you don’t like Rhapsody, don’t use it. But perhaps all of you should try it before you foretell its fate?