Rhapsody also has a web only version but you have to install their plugin. It’s pretty lightweight though and supports Mac + PC (the only platform to do so I believe).

Just chiming in - I looked at Rhapsody’s offering and it’s complicated as hell and not explained very well in the FAQs. They have some web and mac stuff but it doesn’t look full featured.

I wouldn’t call it complicated (just go to http://www.rhapsody.com), but I would say it’s semi-featured. It can be much more difficult to construct playlists via the web interface than with the client. Either way, it’s the only way you can listen to subscription music on the Mac, so it’s probably worth noting.

Also, Virgin, Yahoo! and AOL are all supposedly powered by MusicNet. Shouldn’t they all have the same catalog, or have they negotiated different deals?

what happened to URGE? didn’t microsoft want to offer URGE by now? does anyone now when that launches?

To comment #8:

Microsoft has been speculating a iTunes clone for some time now, as has Dell. I think MS is going to wait until they can offer something that can actually outDO Apple’s product offering.

You present the Google Music Store as fact… Do you know something we don’t?

Anyone know how these companies pay song royalties? Do they pay for each song played or downloaded? Is there a flat rate that they pay the record companies (are they still called that?) for access to their songs. Seems complicated.

how could you *NOT* include emusic???

You might also want to note which of these are compatible with Sonos. As far as I know, Rhapsody is the only one that works with the Sonos digital music system.

You’ve snubbed eMusic.com again…

Forget about DRM and stop ripping off artists.

My favourite site is magnatune.com, because all the music you purchase is WITHOUT DRM and you got it in multiple formats (even WAVs).

Plus the artists gets a fair share.

Quite a lot of good music of all genres over there, even though by the most popular artists.

Support the artists, not the greedy music ‘industry’!

to comment #9

but they actually presented URGE. i saw the webcast and the thing looked pretty mature and solid. not that i would care much personally, as i am a appletree-hugging ipod-lover. but from an industry perspective microsoft seems to be an obvious big-player.

is it possible URGE will ship with the next version of WMP which will come with vista - or am i mixing up the facts?

URGE will ship with the next version of WMP as default (as opposed to MSN Music Store, as I understand it).

However, it’s not a Microsoft iniative. Microsoft gave up its plans for a subscription offering due to, well, RUMORS say price. Microsoft wanted either (1) a better price, given their size or (2) they felt the price for subscription music is too high for mass subscription. Probably a bit of both (plus; those contracts include clauses which state that if any company down the road offers to pay per consumer for subscription music, EVERY company offering subscription music must pay the new, higher, fees. Takes control right out of pricing).

URGE is a MTV-backed service that Microsoft is giving development space for. Nothing (realistically) to do with Microsoft, apart from the technological price.

Microsoft benefits the more companies use their DRM: plain and simple. Offering content is a nice idea, but Microsoft would really prefer third parties do that (from player to music store. It may diversify their revenue stream, but let’s face it - Microsoft is big enough that it doesn’t need to, and it would only complicated its current business model.

Does emusic offer a subscription service ?? Looks to be paying per song to me according to their site.

Rhapsody is available for FREE to Comcast Broadband users in a limited form (free web-radio, 25 free plays per month). Nice to try out songs that way. Goto Comcast.net, download and login with your Comcast email address and password.

Honestly, I used to be a Launch user before they truned into Yahoo music. Yahoo music sucks before it’s a huge ram hog. At the end of the day, the best service is the one that doesn’t kill your comp when you actually try and play music for a while.

I’ve recently signed up to wippit (www.wippit.com) a smaller subscription service, UK based. The Wippit model is interesting, you pay them 50ukp per year and have access to their small 60,000 song catalogue. The tracks are yours to keep, even after cancelling the subscription. Presumably they hope that enough of their subscribers will buy tracks outside the scope of the subscription service (though still discounted for subscribers) to make the model work.

One of the most important features that I think has been left out here is the music sharing features that were prevelant in the first stage of music subscription service.

MusicMatch used to have the best service hands down in that the differentiating factor was that the user could share their playlists with any other subscriber, AND non-subscribers could listen to an entire shared playlist 3 times before the link timed out, all they needed was the MM software. It was a great viral distribution idea for a small company at the time, but obviously is no longer needed with Yahoo’s breadth and pricing changes.

It would be interesting to compare these guys based on their ability to share, from what I understand Rhapsody has the most liberal policy in that it allows non-users to play 25 full-songs in a month.

Your chart states that all these services encode at 128kbs, which is wrong. I know for a fact that Yahoo! encodes at 192kbs. Might want to do a bit more research before posting these comparisons.

I believe Rhapsody encodes at 192kbs, as well. I’ve tried nearly all of them, and Rhapsody is by far the best.

When subscription music came out, I scoffed at the idea - “Why would I pay for music I can only listen to while subscribing?” Rhapsody changed my mind. I find a half dozen albums a month that get added to my rotation, and their interface cannot be beat. Their PC-based service just works. The client is elegant, and playing a song is nearly instantaneous.

Until recently, they had a number of problems in rolling out portable player support for subscription content, but it appears they finally got things working with an update a few weeks ago.

The subscription-based music services default encoding to 128 kbps and if you want to download a track, Yahoo and Rhapsody improve encoding to 192 kbps.

I also want to chime in about eMusic being left out. It is a subscription service which allows you to keep everything you have downloaded, DRM free.

I appreciate you chiming in Keith. eMusic offers a very unique service. They employ a subscription based “buy” model that is DRM-free. The only downer for the average consumer is that the service is focused solely on independent music and therefore not a good choice for the average music listener looking for top 100 hits - hence it was left off.

the only downer about emusic is that there are so many “average” people on this planet

honestly, weak excuse to leave them off, they’re selling more tracks than everyone except itunes

One key point that could have been mentioned in the article is the reason why Rhapsody et al don’t support iPod - Apple won’t license FairPlay (their DRM technology)! I’m sure that Real and the others would love for their music to be playable on iPod, but Jobs hasn’t allowed it yet. I think that Amazon and Google probably have a better shot at it because they have relationships with Apple, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if Apple wants iTunes to continue to be the sole iPod-compatible service. It’s really unfortunate because I think the “all you can eat” sub model is a great deal for consumers, and it’s currently unavailable to iPod owners.

I’ve been subscribing to Rhapsody since early on and it’s been great– up until the point where I upgraded to the “To Go” version and put the Janus firmware on my PMP. In theory, it works great. In Practice, “PlaysForSure” rarely plays for sure. I am about to go back to eMusic. I originally dropped them when they no longer offered unlimited downloads for the price (don’t now how that EVER worked honestly, but it was really nice), but I’m probably going back to them. On the off chance I want a mainstream album, I’ll go to iTunes or wait a month and hit the cut-out bin.

Hi all,

Firstly sray - the payment of royalties is hugely complicated and mostly handled by the companies that provide the back end [they all make us sign NDA though]. My impression is that all the different plans are really just different marketing spin for the same deal in the end.

Mike- I hope you don’t find this rude, but it is kinda on topic - we’re announcing our private beta for our music sharing service - if you want a preview please drop me a line.
http://www.tunefeed.com will go live in a few weeks and we need some beta testers - anyone else interested in legal music sharing should take a look…

Hi All,
I’ve been using Rhapsody to go for about a month now, and love it. It’s fun to try new music without having to make a “commitment”, and the download to my player (samsung Z5) works well. My problem w/ Rhapsody is their anemic playlists — no smart playlists! So I am forced to use WMP10 (grrrr.)

Just a note about file quality, both Rhapsody and Napster are encoding at 192kbps (I do not use Yahoo so I cannot say, but it seems others say 192). Napster has about 75-80% of their library converted to 192kbps and most new files are 192kbps. They were all 128 at one point but upon upgrading to the newer version with a new back-end, they also upgraded their files. I’m not sure about numbers for Rhapsody, but I’ve been getting 192 files more often.

What about allofmp3.com and alltunes.com?

Vorkronor, Thank you! Thank you for pointing me to magnatune.com. Great site and best of all the artist gets money!

it’s definitely time for a change.

the music industry is being turned back into a dynamic of artist and listener with no middle-people in between.

help create a revolution.

musicrevolution.com

Rhapsody DOES work with itunes after you purchase the songs for $0.79 - just a heads up. I have a few gigs on my iPod to prove it.

err, I ment iPod.

Isn’t that $5 yahoo price only if you sign up for a year?

If you’re not looking for a client to download and manage all of your music, then Rhapsody on the Web is probably what you want (not mentioned in the article, though someone suggested in a comment is wasn’t full featured- not sure what they mean).

The biggest plus for Rhapsody (web version) is that it works on Windows, Mac and Linux. You have access to every song you would with a subscription to Rhapsody (thick client) as well as radio. Clearly branding of the two is confusing, but you don’t need to have an account to try it or use it.

Check it out at rhapsody.com for more info.

If you’re using any one of these services, check out Replay Music - you can record songs as fully tagged MP3 files and put them on your iPod or whatever. Really cool.

I use Naspter sevices since one year and it’ s great, i try other and didn’t give me satisfaction.

Cheers

the Yahoo music engine has more than a million songs, much more from what I can tell. But they aren’t allowed to release the exact value. But it’s definitely wayyy more.

Also, Virgin have tiered pricing now as well, and its more expensive than anything else.

Overall, Yahoo is definitely the best service so far.

I’m a happy Yahoo Music Unlimited customer. A key Yahoo feature you left out is that you can use the client simultaneously on up to three machines. AND they sync libraries, so you can add tracks at home and work and stay in sync.

I have a love/hate with Yahoo. Be very careful if you want to sign up with this service. If everything goes just right then it is a decent service to use.

Heaven help you if you need any kind of support whatsoever with this service. Support for this PAID service consists ONLY of email support that takes aproximately 2 to 3 days to get a response. Your first response will be a cut and paste solution to your problem that will not have anything to do with your actual issue. It will then take you several attempts to clarify with them (each taking 2 to 3 days to get a response, each from a different “technician”).

I had 3 seperate issues with them that kept me from downloading music to the portable player. Of the 5 months I have had the service I figure that I have actually been able to use it properly on my to-go devices for a little over 2 months. And Yahoo refuses to issue any credit or refund for the problems (which were all traceable to being their fault).

The music selection is pretty good. The ability to use the Yahoo Music Engine is pretty decent. It will load on 3 computers but you can only be logged into 1 at a time. You can pretty much share the music across 3 portable devices. (Technically you are limited to 2 downloads of any individual song to portable devices but since the wife and kids don’t share the same taste in music, this isn’t too big a problem.) Each portable device has to be slaved to its own computer. You can’t download songs from more than one computer onto one device or the licenses get screwed up.

If you are one of the unfortunate people that are having problems with Yahoo Music, you can go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yme-feedback/ and join that group. It is meant to provide feeback to the Yahoo team but ends up being a place where you can get some advice from others on how to solve some of the more common problems.

Another issue with the client that you should know about before using. THIS COULD BE VERY IMPORTANT TO YOU. The clients try to keep your subscription music in sync between all computers. So if you download something on one computer it will also download it onto the other computers you have hooked up. It is a nice idea but the flaw with it is that you have to decide if you want this feature active when you initially install the software. After that, you are stuck. There is no correct way to undo your selection. So now my wife has hours and hours of the kids music on her work computer and every time they add more, she gets more dumped on her computer.

Be careful on the install. ALWAYS DO A CUSTOM INSTALL. If you don’t then Yahoo is going to take over your home page, your music player settings, it is going to install, Yahoo IM, and a whole host of other annoying features. Yahoo will also change settings on your Windows Media Player 10 that affect your ability to get information from the internet on songs, etc. So beware. Do more research.

Best of luck.

yeah, i love rhapsody but after your review, I’m going to try virgin digital. I mean, I’d like to have my music portable too!

I have been using Yahoo for almost a year and regularly have problems with it locking and freezing although I have 2GB RAM. Their software is awful…but the music choice is fine.
Steve

You’ve mentioned allofmp3.com in your review. Why you’ve missed other ROMS-licensed Russian online music stores like mp3sugar.com or mp3ninja.com, both have extensive music collections. The last one even provides lyrics.

Yahoo, is truly a pig process, but it downloads the songs at 192 BPS - much better quality than any of the others. And the songs are much less at .79.

Virgin Digital has now “partnered” with Napster.

That is to say they’ve been freakishly mind-melded thus inseparable and indiscernible from each other.

yo, anyone know any subscription based services in scandinavia, italy, spain, germany? -= nikkolazzs

I am looking for a subscription service where I can get the songs on my iPod without having to purchase the music. I tried rhapsody then realized after I became a member that iPods were not compatible… I’m not that computer savvy so I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be… I thought an MP3 was an MP3. If anyone knows of anywhere I can go PLEASE tell me. I’m frustrated and desperate.

It appears this is an old post, but still ranked pretty high on google if you’re looking for the differences in subscriptions. I just discovered http://lala.com and I love the format…no commitment necessary!! 6 million song library too…and, you can upload your own songs. Want my take on it? I compared Rhapsody, Napster, Lala and the new MySpace music at http://rockangelmusic.wordpress.com