Thursday, October 05, 2006
Revived Rhapsody Is IPod Wannabe
Looking to copy Apple's closed loop system for downloading music to portable players, RealNetworks teamed up with Best Buy and SanDisk to offer one-stop service for listening to music online and offline. As Wired's Listening Post points out, you can even move all of your iTunes songs to the Rhapsody player.On the face of this it looks like a "me too" product, but the DRM and Real's proprietary format limits the portability of the music. This isn't going to win over iTunes users, but it may attract some folks who are new to digital music.
We're in the middle of a major shift to music as a subscription service. From satellite radio to Rhapsody, the days of the choice between free ad-supported radio where you have no choice in what is played or paying to "own" physical copies are over. If you can hear that favorite Train or Kanye West song whenever you want (car, home, office), why would you want to deal with carting around dozens of CDs that can be ruined or spending hours downloading and copying music to a $200 device that can easily go missing?
The recording artists should be in favor of this shift as it reduces piracy and lets the earn a few cents each time a song is played rather than hoping that someone will pay $15 for an entire album. Today we are experiencing the growing pains as everyone figures out and becomes comfortable with the new world order. It does feel like a loss of control in not having a physical copy, but we'll get used to it.
Posted By John Gartner at 05:09 PM
Permanent Link: Revived Rhapsody Is IPod Wannabe
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