Rhapsody: Let the Groovin' Begin Groovin' to a New Sound Adam Stone
Remember when Napster was still your secret vice, and all you needed to groove on the vibe was RealPlayer and a pair of speakers?
Needless to say, things have gotten a lot more robust. You're paying for downloads now. You've got thousands of MP3s, maybe your entire music collection, piled onto your hard drive. You need to find a way to get to all this music — to play it, burn it, move it to your portable player, and then get more music.
Enter RealNetorks' Rhapsody, a free piece of music management software that includes an on-demand catalog, the ability to transfer songs onto your portable player, an import function, and tools to organize your tunes.
Users can enjoy access to new music on their portable music players and CD players, too, by paying 99 cents to burn a single song or $9.99 for most albums. There are also a number of service plans available, starting with Rhapsody 25, a free service that gives a user access to 25 premium streaming radio stations and 25 song plays per month.
The next step up, Rhapsody Radio is a premium streaming radio service, with no commercial breaks and over 100 stations to choose from, for $3.33 a month. The premier tier of service, Rhapsody Unlimited, lets you play any of over 1 million songs, listen to all the radio stations (as well as create your own customized, commercial-free stations), and get a 10 percent discount on purchased downloads, for $8.33 per month.
Nearly all the leading music subscription services — Rhapsody, Napster To Go, Yahoo Music Unlimited, and others — have been criticized for having catalogs that run a bit thin. With one million songs in its fast-growing collection, Rhapsody however is helping demonstrate the industry's readiness to move to the next level when it comes to the depth and breadth of its offerings. Content comes from all the major labels, including Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner Brothers, and BMG.
Rhapsody makes it easy to sort through that vast compendium, as well as through your local drive, with search capabilities by song title, artist, album, or keyword. Users can also listen to a sample playlist from a band or surf through songs by genre.
The guide to genres is one of Rhapsody's nicer features. New to classical? Rhapsody can offer a sample mix, genre radio stations, plus listings of key artists and popular performers — so now you can bone up on Beethoven in time to fake it at the next wine and cheese fest.
