Rhapsody to hit the iPhone — nice, but too expensive

August 24, 2009 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

rhapsody-iphoneRhapsody is the latest music application hoping to get approved for the iPhone, offering a way to select any song to play from a catalog of more than 8 million tracks.

If it does get approved, it will be the first significant subscription-based music service that lets you select songs directly for play — as opposed to other services, such as Pandora, where you’re relegated to listening to themes or radio stations and not able to pick individual tracks. As such, it is a direct competitor to iTunes, so we’ll see how quickly Apple approves this.

Even then, using the service is expensive. The iPhone application itself is free, but you’ll still need to be paying the $14.99 monthly subscription for Rhapsody’s mobile service, called Rhapsody to Go. If you’re a plain Rhapsody subscriber, at $12.99-a-month, you’ll have to upgrade to the $14.99 per month plan.

Rhapsody is owned by Real, which has just blogged about the application on its site.

I used Rhapsody (I subscribed to it for a while a few years ago), and it was great as far as it went — it lets you create playlists and save them, like other services, and lets you play an artist’s radio. It gives all kinds of information about the artist, the track and related genre — plus new songs that are showing up. However, I gave up on the service because of its limited selection. On the upside, it appears to have since beefed up on its catalog — still, it’s not quite worth the $14.99 a month for me.

See the demo below. Searching and selecting a song is simple. However, keep in mind that this is a web-based service (so requires a connection with 3G, Edge or WiFi), so gets interrupted if you go offline — and thus doesn’t offer the same rich experience as iTunes does, even though it costs so much to use. As Gdgt notes, apparently Rhapsody is working to make this offline capability possible. Another service, Spotify, is planning an iPhone application that caches tracks for offline listening, but Spotify hasn’t even released in the U.S. yet, and there’s no telling when it will be will be available here, let alone on the iPhone.

[Image credit: Gdgt]

Rhapsody on iPhone from Jamie on Vimeo.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • sxates
    $15/mo is too expensive to listen to any song any time anywhere?

    I pay that for Zune, which is quite similar, and would love to have access to the zune library from my iphone. I pay that right now just to have music to listen to at my desk, and adding it to my phone would just be a bonus. Maybe if the iphone was the only place you listened to music it would be a tough sell, but I think the subscription model is right on, and am looking forward to it being supported on more devices.
  • synthmeister
    This is doofus. If you lose the 3G or wifi connection, you lose the music? Why bother?

    They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by simply creating an iPhone optimized website for Rhapsody with a simple subscriber login.

    No approval from the app store necessary.
  • jojo78
    Yes, online access only is going to suck. But once they have the offline capability Rhapsody is great. The only existing problem with Rhapsody is the lack of good mobile devices, but the iphone/touch is going to be great.

    Rhapsody is not really expensive when you count the fact you don't have to buy music. Itunes would be driving me to the poor house if I bought all the music I listen to and have in my library. It really is a good service.