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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio candidates - Moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric L who wrote (1488)	6/10/2005 11:01:52 AM
From: pyslent	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2955

Listen Rhapsody is an entirely different animal than iTunes Music Store... it's a subscription service that allows you to stream any song in their catalog for as long as you are a subscriber. It and competing services like it (Napster Yahoo Music Unlimited) is now offering a feature that the iTunes/iPod can't match-- the ability to load your mp3 player with ANY of these "rented" song for no incremental cost per song. Of course, you can still pay-per download with these services just as you would with iTunes-- you just can't used those purchased songs with the iPod without first transcoding them to an unrestricted mp3 format. My feeling has always been that the appeal of such subscription services will not ultimately be realized until 3G services proliferate and provide for the ability to access streamed music on demand over the air. This circumvents completely the need to transfer digital music from your PC to your phone and gives you access to any song anytime-- a true celestial jukebox.

To: Eric L who wrote (1488)	6/10/2005 2:47:56 PM
From: tinkershaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2955

<<<Please explain what you didn't understand. I have a hard time understanding why anyone who has used iTUNES (or hasn't) can't understand Rhapsody almost instantly. Learning curve is very short.>>> My wife acquired Rhapsody when she purchased the software so that she can stream media on our family web-site. Go figure my law firm site has no such streaming but my non-commercial family web-site does, talk about perverse values my wife has;) In any event, I knew about the Rhapsody subscription service and attempted to sign up and get going on it to try it out, and I don't recall exactly what happened, but the dang thing simply did not work, it was not intuitive, it was not even counterintuitive, and it frustrated me to the point that I simply went to iTunes and started downloading stuff and there it was, no fuss no muss. It may be that I have the resources that I can pay and download what I want without having to think about the cost (at least until my wife tried to put in even more improvements, this time to the backyard) that I was not willing to put up with the hassles of the subscription only service, but that is how I remember my experience. So what I do is I'll just download and purchase songs from iTunes, or if iTunes doesn't have it, I'll buy it from Amazon and then load it on to my iTunes players. Given how little time I have, after it is taken up by stock investing in the side, I have not had time to learn another format or another way of doing things and had Rhapsody made the initial process easier for me, they may have captured me as a client about 6-12 months ago. Who knows, they may in the future as well. However, I've spent a lot of time loading up my iTunes catalog. I actually erased my old catalog off the hard drive by mistake, a few hundred dollars worth of stuff. Instead of bringing in the computer forensic guy to recover it (cost me a $1000 to recover my business documents) I still re-acquired my library. I guess on Rhapsody such a loss would not be possible. Tinker