Dude, you do not want to start a discussion on that.
It’s been done, and after everyone stops crying all you have is a headache.
I’m a Yahoo Music Unlimited subscriber and think it’s great. My Music Library that I’ve downloaded is now over 5,000 songs - only costs me $60/year.
Only thing is, you can only transfer your subscription music to certain mp3 players - and iPod is not one of them.
The 128k AAC format that Itunes uses is better than mp3. It sounds pretty much like a CD in most circumstances.
Another vote for subscription services. I use both Yahoo and Rhapsody, although only one is enough. Right now I have about 800 songs on my Zen Micro, all subscription. That’s $800 worth of music for $15 per month, and no limit on the amount of new tunes I can download. I probably have about 5000 songs from these places on my hard drive right now. It really is the way to check out new bands. True, I can’t burn them to CD, but I don’t need to. I have the Zen.
If I use a subscription service and download songs to my hard drive and mp3 player (which I don’t have but might buy) - then I end my subscription, can I still play the downloaded songs or do the become unusable immediately or in the near future?
They become unavailable once you stop the subscription. Subscription-based players (either on the PC or the standalone MP3 players) connect to the Internet every once in a while to verify the status of your subscription. If it’s not valid, the music won’t play.
Whether it’s worth it depends on your music-listening habits: Do you like to try out a lot of different songs? A subscription service will give you access to thousands of songs, including the new ones that come out every month, for just $5 a month. If you listen to just five new songs a month, it’s worth the money.
On the other hand, if you have a small set of favorite songs that you listen to near-exclusively – less than 20, for examply – it’d make more sense to just buy them individually so you can use them forever. But if they’re your favorite songs, wouldn’t you already have the the CDs or MP3s?
Another way to think about it is how much money you spend on music in an average year. $5 a month comes out to about $60 a year, so if you spend more than that on CDs or downloads anyway, you might as well switch to a subscription service. As long as you keep subscribing, you’ll have access to all your past tracks and all the future ones too.
That’s right. The licenses for the tracks are supposedly good for 3 or 4 weeks. Unfortunately, there is no indication on my Zen when the tracks will expire, so sometimes I’ll take it to work only to find out that my tracks won’t play until I reconnect the player to my PC. That sucks. It’s not perfect, and I’ve detailed some of the problems I’ve had elsewhere on the boards. Still, I like the subscription services. When I first heard of them, I thought they were dumb. Then I looked at my stack of about 300 CD and figured that a) I don’t listen to most of them anymore, and b) at $15 each, that would pay for 25 years of subcriptions.
I think Rhapsody has a free trial period (and probably the other services do to) so check them out and decide for yourself. In addition to the subcriptions, these places let you buy the individual tracks and burn them to a CD. In fact, I think Rhapsody has a completely free version that allows you 25 free streams per month. That might work for you.
As I said, I’ve been on the Napster canada subscription plan for about two months now, and while I don’t think I really like it as a long-term thing, it’s working out pretty well as a ‘try before you buy’ kind of deal. I can listen to a bunch of songs by artists I like once or twice, come up with lists of which ones I want to spend a buck on and buy permanently, and which ones I don’t. At puretracks, I was listening to a bunch of 20-second clips for the tracks off the new amanda stott album, say, and guessing which ones I’d really like. Lots of misses that way, in both directions (You buy a track and then have buyer’s remorse, or pass over something that you really love, once you get a chance to really listen to it.)