ON BUYING OR RENTING MUSIC

FILL 'ER UP SOME MORE

A few days ago I commented on Microsoft bundling some sample music and videos onto it's upcoming Zune player, going up against Apple's iPod juggernaut.

Today, the Wall Street Journal's  Walt Mossberg describes the new Sansa MP3 player from Sandisk (known for their flash memory chips), which comes filled with a lot more music, courtesy of Real Networks' Rhapsody music subscription service.

As Walt explains:

"This is the first player to be specifically designed to work with RealNetworks' Rhapsody music-subscription service, and it's no mere iPod clone. The player, made by SanDisk, is designed to show off the Rhapsody music-rental model, which is about music discovery rather than individual song or album purchases.

Like other subscription services, Rhapsody charges a monthly fee for unlimited access to millions of songs. You don't actually own these songs, and any music you've rented and downloaded from Rhapsody becomes unplayable if you stop paying the monthly fee, which is $14.99 a month if you want to hear the music on both a PC and on a portable device.

But Real believes that for people who love to try new artists or hear "channels" of music, this is better than buying individual songs and albums that never expire, which is Apple's model. It stresses quantity and variety, and for the new Sansa Rhapsody player, it drives this message home by filling the devices with music. You can play this music free for up to two months before you have to buy a subscription."

And you get a fair bit of music pre-filled in onto the Sansa:

"On the base, 2-gigabyte model, fully half of the storage capacity is taken up with preloaded music. On the higher-capacity models, which feature up to 8 gigabytes of total storage, 2 gigabytes is taken up with preloaded music."

Walt didn't like some aspects of the current Sansa Rhapsody offering:

"Personally, I found the preloaded music more of a hassle than a boon. It included both canned playlists and channels -- preprogrammed radio stations. They featured numerous artists and genres I didn't like, or actually hated, and I was forced to delete most of them and replace them with music I wanted to hear.

Before I could do this, however, I was amazed to find that Rhapsody wanted to keep adding its own choices to my player. The minute I plugged it into my PC, the service began downloading 73 songs of its own choosing to the Sansa, to "refresh" the choices that came on the device. Real says it plans to change this behavior to ask users first whether they want such a refresh."

These of course, are potentially fixable software issues.  They can be improved upon in future versions.

It'll be interesting to see if Rhapsody partners with makers of other MP3 players, particularly hard-disk based MP3 players, and offer this pre-fill capability.  Imagine a 60 or 80 GB MP3 player, where a quarter or more comes pre-filled with music, and eventually videos via a subscription.

It's becomes an interesting alternative for the iPod buy it or rip-it-from-your-own-CDs model, especially as the capacity on these devices goes up far more than mainstream users' ability to fill it up the current way.

And of course, it could do a lot for music and video discovery.

This concept could give the subscription model a new leash on life.  Maybe.

I'm intrigued enough to try a Sansa, especially since I already have a Rhapsody subscription for my Sonos home music system.

Will report back on if I like it.

Comments

[Yaser Anwar]

I've actually written a thesis on the changes mp3 players have gone over the last three years as a uni. project.

Part of this thesis was a survey of student tastes and to gauge affordibility. Based on my results more than 80% of the people would not pay over 7-8$ a month for music which they can get for free online. If they really like a song, higher chances are they will buy it & if they like more than one song of an album, the probability of purchase doubles.

Other than that, university students like ease of use, and Apple is by far the # 1 choice due to its patented controls on the iPod.

In Canada, the laws don't permit the music companies to search an individual's personal collections, whereas in US you can get fined if they discover illegal downloads.

A while back Yahoo had a good offer, if I remember correctly, of 60$ a year for music, that was pretty good.

Personally, I wouldn't want to pay more than 10$ a month for any subscriptions to music services nor would I like pre-loaded stuff. As it becomes a hassle to delete the stuff of.

[Jerimiah]

I have one of the new Sansa Rhapsody players - the e260R (4GB) model. It came with a ton of stuff on it, which was cool for about an hour. Then I couldn't wait to clear it off and make it my own.

Once I hooked it up to Rhapsody, it took about 45 seconds for me to delete all the preload stuff off the device. I can't complain about that!