Fred Wilson at A VC recently wrote a post commenting on David Kirkpatrick’s recent column Looking beyond the iPhone, where he makes the case that the future of digital music is Rhapsody, not iTunes. Most of the comments were in favor of the iTunes model. I’m with Fred and David on this. This is the comment that I left on Fred’s blog…
I’m one of those people who used to say I would never use a subscription music service. When I bought my Sonos system a year and a half ago, I tried out a free 30-day trial of Rhapsody. I was hooked and continue to use Rhapsody to this day. Here’s why I like it…
– every Tuesday when new music is released, I can find 95% of it on Rhapsody and add it to my Rhapsody library
– if I discover a new artist, album, track, etc. on Pandora, last.fm, on a music blog, on Hype Machine, on the radio, etc. I can go to Rhapsody and find it (again, 95% of the time i can find it). Using a subscription music service doesn’t mean you don’t listen to & discover new music through other channels.
– I have gone through the effort of adding most of the music that I own (mostly ripped CD’s and a couple hundred tracks that I bought on iTunes when it first came out) and added it to my Rhapsody catalog. This allows me to access my music from the “cloud” wherever I am. This wouldn’t be possible on an iPod because my digital music collection is several hundred GB. Yes, I know that there are other ways of doing this through Orb and Streampad but that limits my collection to what I already own.
– I rarely deal with the crappy Rhapsody software. I listen to Rhapsody on Sonos (which has a great user interface) and on YottaMusic, which accesses the Rhapsody catalog through an API. In a few months I will be able to access my subscription music wirelessly through devices such as Sansa Connect. With free Wi-Fi coming soon to my area (San Francisco) that means I can access Rhapsody 24×7 wirelessly wherever I am in San Francisco. By the way, YottaMusic gives you an option to scrobble your music to last.fm.
– if you want to own your digital music, don’t forget that you need to store it somewhere and back it up on a regular basis. Costs for this have come down but it will still run you a few hundred bucks to set up a system to store 100 GB of music and have it backed up somewhere. And you’ll still have a chance of losing it all if your house is hit with a fire, a flood, etc. With subscription-based music services this is a non-issue.
I don’t look at subscription-based music services as a replacement for purchasing music through iTunes or buying CD’s. I see it as a way of supplementing my music collection and expanding my access to it.
For the record, I have absolutely no connection to Rhapsody, YottaMusic, Sonos, or SanDisk (maker of Sansa).
