Rhapsody, one of the very earliest of legitimate online music services and, as a result, one of the first to be hammered by the juggernaut that became iTunes, has finished the spin-off process from Real Networks and like a divorcee celebrating the end of a rocky marriage, has made some changes.
First, an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch application version of the Rhapsody service is now available and the big news is it delivers all the value of a subscription service – access to the entire catalog Rhapsody’s amassed over the years – a single, predictable monthly payment and portability – play it on your PC, play it on your iPhone or iPad or through your Sonos system (or whatever hip/cool/homegrown solution you have for multiroom audio).
And it’s $10/month. (Rhapsody Premier Plus is $14.99 and enables the use to run it on three separate mobile devices.)
So anyhow, much has been made of the fact here and here, that the newly single Rhapsody got to market first the feature competitors such as MOG’s All Access are still developing, and others like Spotify have deployed (at least in the U.K., the company’s still somewhat coy about when, but in my mind it’s still “if” they come to the U.S.): the ability of a Rhapsody subscriber to create a secure cache of songs – be it a set of playlists, entire albums, or a genre – on an iPhone or iPad and play that cache without having the device connected to the Internet.
Is this a big deal? Well, sure, getting to market first with a solution that delivers what I believe most music consumers would think is an obvious capability has its advantages. But as a practical matter, MOG’s All Access – which will have a smartphone option available in the summer — was able to take advantage of a major shift in licensing terms and practices by the labels to create it’s PC/browser version of All Access. (Which is to say it’s an advantage but short-term because virtually all other services will negotiate similar deals.) The relaxing of license terms, and the onerous licensing fees many online music services have had to pay the labels, is as important as any of these new services.
Rhapsody, MOG’s All-Access and, probably, maybe, at some point, Spotify, are all important indicators that given a rich catalog of content, a reasonably simple set of interfaces and extensions to mobile/portable devices, consumers will pay for content. The big “if” is IF the service offers an interesting experience. For everything else, iTunes was, at the time of launch, and remains to this day an online store. Apple creates a unique experience by seamlessly integrating PC-based software (iTunes), a set of unique and, so far, very popular pieces of hardware (iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, not to mention Macs).
So while maybe the ‘00s were about free content (as in portable and as in “free beer”), it would seem that the next decade of the 21st century will be about consumers paying directly for content experiences.