Beyond Two-Four

Music subscription services, to me, are a substantial solution to a myriad of problems: illegal file sharing, musicians not receiving royalties, digital copying realities and so on.

The concept of renting or leasing music also has benefits from the consumer side of things. First, I tend to devour music I’m interested in; then, after a period of time, the CD tends to sit on my shelf for years. Eventually, with the exception of my few all-time favorite bands over the years, the CDs go up on Half.com. So aside from my favorites, I tend to consume music temporarily anyway.

So a year ago, my wife and I got our first MP3 players and signed up for Yahoo Music Unlimited. We were attracted to the idea and found a generally good selection of music.

So why did I recently dump Yahoo Music’s unlimited subscription service?

In solving many problems, as mentioned above, Yahoo’s investment into a subscription-based service dealt with consumer demand at a very nice price—about $10/month for taking music to go on portable players. On the surface, they present the best deal in contrast with Rhapsody, Napster and Itunes.

In reality, though, Yahoo Music is a big piece of shit. Its interface is buggy as hell. During the last year I had to uninstall it and reinstall it at least three different times just to get it to function properly. Its subscription technology required updating licenses just about every time I opened the player to either download new music or transfer to my player. This meant that on a regular basis, I couldn’t play the music I had previously transferred to my player.

Just recently, for no apparent reason, I couldn’t even log in to my account to play, download or transfer music. This lasted for about a day. When I was able to login again, all my licenses required updating—for about 16 gigabytes worth of songs. From there, I still couldn’t transfer music to my player. Tech support is virtually non-existent. No readily found contact information is available for direct help. And Yahoo’s online help is superficial at best.

I had to uninstall and then reinstall the player again. This meant downloading all of my music to get things back to normal.

I gave up.

I began researching competitors. Napster does not have an easily found catalog of their music, so I couldn’t verify if they had the specific bands I was looking for. Itunes is out because it’s pay-per-song and I find Ipods overpriced compared with non-Mac-based mp3 players (although, Ipods have the advantage of being very slick and having a huge amount of readily available accessories). Rhapsody, fortunately has all the features, and bands, I was looking for, plus you can play songs for free before purchasing anything. It’s $5 more a month, but you subscribe monthly as opposed to Yahoo’s yearly subscription payable in advance.

I was hesitant about Rhapsody mainly because Real’s Real Player was tremendously annoying. Thankfully Rhapsody’s interface appears idiot proof. Perfect. I’ll follow up in a year to see how it works out.

Final thoughts—a buying tip for drummers

When buying something, it’s generally a bad idea to base decisions on anecdotes like mine above. If a friend buys a car that turns out to be a lemon, while 98 percent of car owners have the exact opposite experience with their vehicles, to judge the car by your friend’s experience likely translates to a loss for you.

It’s important to pay attention to a range of potential reviews, particularly the bad ones. Although, there’s a caveat: negative reviews of a product tend to hold more weight in our minds. To counter this, Amazon.com has a great system for product reviews. Anyone can review something, but others can challenge and rate the reviewers, which adds another layer of credibility and accuracy to the overall impression of the product.

In the drum world, we are somewhat less fortunate because many of the drum products on Amazon tend to be the most commercially available. However, sites like MusiciansFriend, GuitarCenter, Music123 and SameDayMusic each tend to have reviews of products. For more custom products, or reviews from more experienced players, try some of the sites linked in my blogroll.

Happy shopping.