For a bit more than the price of a satellite radio subscription, you can download all the music you want to the gadget you already own, your mobile phone.
Verizon Wireless is introducing Rhapsody’s subscription music service Monday, allowing its customers to download as much music as they want to their phones for $15 per month. The service will work with seven current handsets and three to be launched soon, including the third version of the popular music-oriented LG Chocolate.
As every mobile phone owner knows, we replace our phones far more often than we replace our radios. I think my clock radio has been with me since Bush The Elder was in the White House.
And I have written previously about the shift towards an “all you can eat” model in an era when mp3 providers are moving away from DRM, digital rights management.
Anything that removes speed-bumps to downloading what you want, when you want it, and does so for a bargain price, will increase the degree to which the mobile phone substitutes for a radio-like experience.
So again I have to ask a question I’ve asked many times before:
What will your station provide that I can’t download from Rhapsody when and wherever I want it?