So I've been doing my best to be a good lil' consumer and buy all my songs. After some evaluations, I subscribed to Yahoo Music Unlimited Canada about a year ago. The service allows you to download/use anything from their fairly extensive library, at a cost of just under $10/month. Sure they are all locked up with DRM and can't be burned - but I use my computer(s) as the source anyways most times. No iPod support (Windows DRM), but I didn't care.
It's been quite good. The library is sometimes awkward to scan through, but generally I can get any relatively mainstream song I want, and play it on up to 5 computers (except the PS3). I've downloaded hundreds, if not thousands of songs. All neatly organized into various playlists and genres.
Until Now. (Well, a few months ago, but I didn't care until the discontinuation is truly looming..:)
Yahoo announced that they are discontinuing this service completely, and it's being merged with Rhapsody. Rhapsody is a great service...but isn't available in Canada. Everything will be gone! All my playlists screwed up....my library cut down....
And what makes it worse is the other services here suck. And I mean SUCK. The Sympatico MSN Music Store is a freakin' joke. I'd ask you to try it, but it would be like that old SNL skit - "Ohhhh...this milk is baaad! YOU try it!!!"
iTunes? Forget it - if you don't back up, you're screwed (and I switch computers fairly often). And that's technically the old model - "ownership of a license to use a song permanently", just distributed electronically. I suppose I could do what most do - burn and rip to remove DRM, but that's too much work for a lazy guy like me. Napster Canada? Nah - apparently the selection is meh.
Why can't I have a Music-as-a-Service option in Canada? If it was $20/month, I'd pay. If the service had a good enough library, I would pay $30-$50/month!!
I guess I might try napster canada....but...
RHAPSODY COME TO CANADA!!!!
1 comment:
And they wonder why Canada has such a high piracy rate...
We had a really high distillation rate during prohibition, too. When you can't get what you want, you'll find a way.
Rip and burn has just been the easiest method by many orders of magnitude. Whoever can give us a way to get the tunes we want in a way that's easy and useful will laugh all the way to the bank.
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