Subscription-based music service Rhapsody has dropped its price from $15 per month to $10 per month. That means you can listen to any of the 9 million songs available in the Rhapsody library on any supported device for $10 per month, which is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying and downloading each song outright. The difference is that if you stop paying your monthly subscription all the music goes away.
The new $10 Rhapsody Premier music streaming service is available for PC, a variety of home audio devices, and smartphones including the iPhone and Google Android. In fact, the Android app just came out of beta in the Android Market today. A BlackBerry client is expected soon as well.
Dave, do you use Rhapsody? Do you like it? Have you used it on your TiVo?
I’ve used it on and off over the years.
In fact, I attended TiVo’s Real/Rhapsody launch event in NYC a few years back and played a bit with the iPhone client at launch.
I’m not a big fan of playing music via a TV-based device (like TiVo or Roku), but I do appreciate the Rhapsody service. At $15ish, I felt they were overpriced compared to similar services. But $10/mo is very competitive, especially considering the large number of devices they support beyond the computer. They have programmed genres, but what appeals to most is the ability to play ANYTHING at ANY time and create playlists of ANYTHING. The iPhone client doesn’t currently allow you to download songs, so it’s streaming only. But a caching solution is in the works.
But I’m lazy, and Slacker’s “stations” are sufficient for me 85% of the time. So I pay them about $4/month for unlimited skips and ad-free playback. They’re also about to bring caching to the iPhone, but it’s all pre-selected stuff. No thought required on my part. I just wish Sonos would get with the program by integrating Slacker.
Good at $15.00. Great at $10.00.
Sonos + Rhapsody is absolute nirvana for checking out a ton of new and different music.
Thanks for the heads up on the price change.
Not sure how long rhapsody was going to go on charging me $15.00, but now I’ll never know.
I love the service on my Sonos boxes.
I pay buy the year ($129.99); has the yearly rate dropped as well?
I am giving it a go on the Droid. I was an early adopter back when they were offering DRM’ed offline music with Plays For Sure and ended up canceling because it constantly lost my DRM authentication on the Sansa player I had. That was back before 3g phones with data streaming capabilities. It’s great concept. I like the idea of having all that music on demand. It’s certainly worth 10 bucks a month. That’s about 1 album on iTunes. Plus, all the old stuff that’s out there on demand is cool.
Is anyone else wondering how they can slice their revenues by 1/3 and still be viable? I’ve read that they had around 700K subscribers, so the hit they take is massive when they cut prices by 33%. Maybe they have a lot of annual subscribers who locked in already, but it’s hard to believe that they can slash their prices this much and still hang in. They are going have to meter users at some point, don’t you think?
The recent blog post elaborating on their divorce from Real indicates they have 150 employees in the cities. If they cut that by 2/3 (50 people, 1 city), they’d probably be in a much better place financially.
I’ve been on the fence about subscribing to Rhapsody for years now, but with the $9.99 price point I think they struck a chord and I’m planning on going for it. If there are many more like me–and I’m guessing Rhapsody is making a calculated bet that there are–they’ll more than make up for the diminished per-existing-user revenue by boosting their subscription base considerably.
The subscription model is yet another manifestation of “cloud computing” and is surely the future. Who wants to deal with hard drives, NAS’s, LANs, backups, sync issues, etc, when you can outsource all that to the Great Big Server in the Sky?