There’s no more need to own songs before being able to listen to them at your convenience.
No more stacking your CDs on shelves or buying music to download onto computers and mobile devices. Virtually the whole world of recorded music is at your fingertips at any time, for a subscription, over the Internet.
Services that make this scenario possible haven’t proven very popular yet. But now price cuts and advances in technology could finally drive the idea to the mainstream.
For instance, Rhapsody International Inc. and Thumbplay Inc. now offer the ability to pick almost any song or album and play it instantly on a mobile device that connects to the Internet over cell phone networks. The services are $10 a month.
Justin Darcy, a 32-year-old sales director at a resort company in San Francisco, says he consumes so much music it would cost him $10,000 a year if he didn’t have a Rhapsody plan. He calls it “one of the greatest values in consumer goods I’ve ever come across.”
Given the obvious benefit of being able to listen to millions of songs as if they were in your personal stash, why haven’t services like these gotten more use?
Partly because of poor marketing, previously clunky execution and the fact that people are more familiar with compact discs and downloading songs from Apple Inc.’s iTunes music store. People who spend less than $120 a year on music also wouldn’t see the subscription plans as such a great deal.
But the music providers hope they can get more customers by making the services easier to use, taking advantage of increasingly robust cell phone networks to deliver the music. And in general, consumers are getting more comfortable using many kinds of services that rely on files stored on distant computers and accessed remotely, a concept known as “cloud…