We lost Car City Classics and Record Time this year. Detroit-Area institutions where one could lose themselves for hours at a time browsing through stacks of vinyl and cds. Border's Books and Music, whose music section was quite comprehensive for a Big Box store, also gave up the battle to stay afloat.Where do you go if you want to purchase music beyond the selections carried at your local Walmarts, Target or Best Buy? Ten years ago, folks living in Northern Oakland County could choose between a couple of Harmony House stores or Borders, or even a couple of cool indie stores in the Pontiac area. They are all gone now!
Many folks turn to online "on-demand" music services such as Spotify, Mog, Rdio or Napster. The basic model is that the subscriber pays a monthly fee, about 12 dollars or so, which allows you to listen on demand to millions of songs for about the price of a cd. Each of these services allows you to download tunes to a mobile device for "on-the-go" listening for a little bit of a premium on top of the monthly fee. It is estimated that, in 2012, these services will grow by about 300%.
What is the downside to these services? I subscribe to more than one because they all have unique features that the other services don't have. They all support some form of social networking where you can trade playlists of music with your friends. The capacity to go to one of these services and satisfy your desire to hear a song that you crave played instantly is the number one reason to subscribe. If you had arrived in a time machine to tell my teenage self that in the future, millions of songs would be a keyboard click away, I would have called you insane (after first asking you if you could give me the names of upcoming World Series winners so I could get rich "Biff Tanner style").
The online service that has the most songs is Spotify with about 12 million. You can easily Google (or Bing if you are a contrarian) the rankings of what service has the most songs.
One drawback is that a lot of artists don't allow their music to be accessed in this manner. The artists missing from these services include The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Metallica and a few more, mostly Classic Rock era warhorses. But these numbers dwindle as the management of these artists see the wisdom of taking their acts online.
The other big drawback is sound quality. Spotify is about the best streaming their music at the highest bitrates for better sound. Rhapsody appears to have the lowest bitrate of all the major streaming services. Generally, higher bitrate=better sound. None of these services can match the sound of a good cd or a nice piece of vinyl on a good system. Like an MP3 player or IPOD, sound quality is compromised for convenience.
But if you are going to consider an online service, do a little research. If you are willing to pay a little for music, you will get a lot in return. As we head into 2012, a shakedown is coming and some of these services may not survive. Napster was recently purchased by Rhapsody, which was the first on-demand service, but has since been eclipsed by it's newer rivals. The new Rhapsody/Napster will be unveiled in December in hopes of getting back some of Rhapsody's lost market share.
I have added below a link to an article from PC World which is about 2 weeks old but is a good starting point if you are looking to subscribe. If you are looking for that hard to find gift for the music lover, and they don't have an online music service, gift subscriptions are available from all the services.
Happy Listening!
Spotify Shakes Up Online Music Landscape, Consumers Win
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