Who says that people won't pay for content! Below is a quote from a New York Times article outlining the use of music dowload sites. The article also contains information on movies, sports and talk radio feeds as well.
With Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com), consumers pay $9.95 a month to stream or download as much music as they want from a catalog of more than 55,000 albums. Customers also receive a broad range of other content, including music videos and band information with their subscription.
To keep the tunes and burn them onto a CD, however, costs a 79 cents a song.
The Rhapsody software gives customers an easy and quick way to search for songs by artist, song and album name. It also presents a sample of a given artist's popular songs, related artists and an option for saving playlists for later use.
Like RealNetworks, Napster (www.napster.com) also sells a music subscription service, with more than 700,000 songs available for $9.95 a month. (As with Real's services, Napster lets subscribers listen to as much music as they want, but they never actually own the tunes; when the subscription lapses, the music is deleted from their computer unless it has been purchased separately.)
Microsoft's MSN Music site (beta.music.msn.com) plans a link to Napster's service, while putting up single-song downloads of its own for 99 cents.
Apple, the clear online music leader with over 125 million songs sold, offers only permanent downloads, not streaming, through its iTunes Music Store (www.apple.com/itunes/store). Thus far for streaming, RealNetworks has been the subscription leader with more than 550,000 customers.
