I love Rhapsody. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up for this the second it was available. If you don’t know anything about online music services, let me give you the nutshell version of why I now can not live without Rhapsody. BTW, Rhapsody is Real Networks entry into the online music biz, following iTunes, and Napster. Full history if you’re interested.

For $10/month, I can listen to almost all of the music they’ve got, and it’s pretty extensive (over 3 million tracks) due to their contracts with all of the major record labels. I can organize these tracks however I want (playlists, etc.), and seconds after selecting a track, it starts playing and the quality is surprisingly good. Their built-in “Music Guide” lets me read up on the artists, find similar artists, play albums in their entirety, or select tracks or add them to my library. They’ve got an interesting feature that plays a ‘radio station’ of an artist’s genre of music. It’s not perfect, but it helps you to find stuff that’s similar in nature.

Of course, I could buy these tracks as well, but I haven’t dug deeply enough into their DRM rules to figure out if I would be hosed if I lost or moved my data. For an additional $5/mo, I can get the “to go” plan which lets me put the music onto my portable MP3 player. I haven’t decided to try that out yet. Word of warning on that though – it doesn’t work with iPods due to DRM issues.

All in all, if you like music only just a little bit and have a high speed Internet connection, get Rhapsody!