DAVIDHERSH

You ever have one of those purchases that you're utterly and completely satisfied with? I signed up for the Rhpasody streaming music service last weekend and so far this definitely falls into that category. I've been addicted to it right from the moment I signed up!

Unlike other pay-per-download services, Rhapsody is primarily a subscription service where you can play any song they have for either $9.95/month or $24.95/quarter. I say primarily because they also have radio stations and you can burn songs to a CD for $.79/track. I might try the radio stations at some point, but have no interest in buying tracks. Mostly because it seems like the quality isn't too good if you burn to CD and then rip back to MP3.

The big selling point here is that notionally you can listen to any song any time you want. Reality is that they don't have every song, but they do have over 800,000. I've definitely run into some things they don't have, but not enough to diminish my enjoyment of the service.

I'm a big music fan, but my annual purchases of CDs have dropped way off in recent years. I just don't feel like buying CDs unless I really know I'm going to like it. Except for the rare occasion that I get to park myself in front of a listening station at Virgin records, my evaluation of a new disc is pretty much limited to 30-second clips on Amazon. You just can't get a feel for a CD that way.

I absolutely love being able to really listen to new music now. I can try out anything I want, whenever I want. It's really like being a kid in a candy store! For a music lover, it's really an amazing feeling. Plus, there's all of those albums (album?! what's that?) that you'd like to listen to once in a blue moon, but would never consider buying. Now you can listen to them whenever you want. They even have children's music for Lyla.

Obviously, the downside to this is that you can't take the music with you. In other words, you can't download songs onto an MP3 player. I'm not concerned about that, as my iPod is filled with 3,000+ tracks from my CD collection. I am curious, though, as to how this will affect my buying of CDs. I suspect that it will cause it to drop even further (or even eliminate all purchases) because I don't commute to work and only need music on the go for when I go down to the gym. My current collection should suffice there. I suspect that the only way I would actually buy a CD now is if I really, really loved it and wanted to have it on my iPod and accessible wherever I go.

The application itself is well designed. You can use keyword searches to find music, or you can browse by genre. For each artist they have a short overview, most popular tracks, a sampler of songs, similar artists, in addition to the artist's albums, singles and compilations that contain the artist. You can add albums and individual songs to your library for easy access in the future. The library could probably be a little more robust, along the lines of what you'd find in iTunes or MusicMatch, but it does the trick. You can also create and save playlists.

I'm listening to the music on a PC with a wireless connection and the quality is great. I've only had the connection dropout once.

There's a 7-day free trial and I would really recommend that any music lovers out there give it a shot. Props to Gersh for turning me on to this!