Comments on: Yottamusic Dead; Subscription Music in Intensive Care

By: AudioLemon

AudioLemon — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:53:22 +0000

I would like to see a media subscribtion attached to my ISP subscribtion. Somewhere between €10 and €20 a month. I can chose various packages like Electronic and Rock or Pop and 80’s… of course you would get a number of standard channels that feature ads for free.

The more choice you want the more you pay. I would also like to have unlimited access to that media… on any digital device I have. This includes both streaming and download formats.

I would also like to have a better music player. One version of IPOD has 160GB storage to me this signifies something has gone wrong.
Ideally I would like a player that streams music whenever and wherever I want. Instead of using scrolling interfaces I would prefer to hum a tune, or quote a line of lyrics and be presented with a number of probable matches.

Also if the player could automatically identify and retrieve any music that is played in my general vicinity. Very useful for finding out more about music.

I think we are not in the future yet.

By: Keebs

Keebs — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:43:21 +0000

Although I think subscription music in its current form may not be a viable option, I think paying a recurring fee for music is not. What I would love to see is record labels/whatever-you’d-call-this-new-entity that charge a monthly fee, but release some number of songs per month in high-quality drm-free format. I’d pay $5/month for 10 drm-free 320 kbps mp3s, even if I only liked half of them.

Granted, there are some problems with this idea, the largest being that the label is much less motivated to find good music that people will pay for… because they’re already paying for it. *shrug*

There’s gotta be a good way to implement this or some subscription service I think.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:10:44 +0000

Anu, I believe it’s complicated … I just mean the end result is the same: one less option. As I said, I’d be happy to see Rhapsody apply some of the intelligence of Yotta to the rest of the site. In fairness, yes, even my uneducated external perspective on the situation suggests that this is internal Rhapsody politics/wrangling, not the death of subscription services. But it does NOT help strengthen subscription’s model by any means.

By: Anu

Anu — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:59:40 +0000

As a long-time reader of the site and someone who has been deeply involved with Rhapsody for a long time, I can tell you the situation with Yotta is much more complicated than your analysis/description makes it seem.

I was sad to see Yotta shut down as well.

Check out MOG’s Rhapsody integration if you want something else.