I upgraded my Rhapsody service to the Rhapsody To Go account last night, and it is a wonderful thing. I just got my Axim a couple weeks ago (first post - hello everybody!
), and have been feverishly trying to configure it to become the one device to rule them all. Discovering that Rhapsody To Go had been upgraded to be compatible with any WMP10 Mobile PPC was a godsend. When I signed up with Rhapsody a few months ago, this functionality was working poorly and only on a few select devices. I'd actually planned on cancelling Rhapsody, since I just don't listen to music off my computer much (kinda defeats the purpose of the surround sound system in the other room).
There appears to be a lot of debate about the use of DRM to control music, which I can understand. And a lot of debate about the value of paying $15/month without even owning the songs. To me, that's the best part. As opposed to paying $15 per month to get ONE new CD (of which I usually only like 1/3 of the songs) or even paying a download service $15 to get 15-20 songs, I can have thousands available to me at any time. All the music services I've encountered that work solely on pay per song (iTunes, MusicMatch, et al) only allow you to listen to 30 seconds of each song. I don't know if I like a song based on 30 seconds of it!!! I like to be able to listen to it several times. Sure, if it's something popular on the radio, I get to hear it several times before deciding to buy, but then I have to listen to a bunch of crap I have no interest in listening to (including commercials and dumb DJs, since I don't spring for Satellite Radio). With a subscription based service like Rhapsody, I can listen to a song that I have no intention of buying. Most of the songs I listened to on Rhapsody to Go on my Axim X50v today, I heard them a couple of times, they're not bad, I'm glad I can listen to them if I want to but they aren't worth even a buck to me to own ($.79, $.89, whatever, it all adds up pretty fast). I downloaded over 50 new songs last night. If I'd had to get that same selection through a pay-per-song service, I would have picked up maybe 20 of the songs to try, I'd be out $18. That's one day. Granted, to continue listening to them, I'll have to continue paying $15/month. But that's ok, because I want to be able to listen to new music every month without having to spend $15/month to just get one album's worth of new stuff.
I see that there is another thread running on the similar Yahoo Music service, which I haven't tried yet, but I'll check it out. $15/month is no big deal to me, but $5/month is a better deal if they offer similar selection/quality/ease of use. I can't imagine that this model of listening to music won't catch on - I'll be listening to hundreds more songs per month than I would on a system where I pay to own the music.
The one catch seems to be that only WMP can handle the DRMs to play the music. Like most folks here, I find the mobile version of WMP10 on my Axim to be woefully underfeatured compared to its PC version or other music players available for Windows Mobile. So far I like PocketMusic; I was going to try several more, but if none of them will play the DRM-encoded music from Rhapsody, I'll have to choose the immensely greater music library available through R2Go to WMP over the better interfaces/equalizers/playlist management of the competitors. Not that I like helping Microsoft monopolize, but... thousands of songs is a compelling argument. Does anybody know of any other players that can recognize the DRMs?
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