Play If You Want Me To Pay.
Pay to Play
"Looking for a more reliable and ethical online music experience than that of peer-to-peer Napster wanna-bes? Tired of iMesh and LimeWire? It's time to consider a for-pay option.
For the standard price of about $9.95 per month, you can join a subscription music service and discover some breaking new bands or reconnect with swinging oldies. The growing field of subscription services offers a surprising degree of variation, too.
To help you navigate this expanding collection of pay-to-play services, we reviewed every option on the market, from BurnItFirst, with its Christian music bent, to Listen.com's Rhapsody, which stands out with its stellar online radio stations. For now, no single service offers everything that your wallet desires, but read on to find out which will appeal most to your particular taste." [CNET]
This round-up of online music services illustrates perfectly the problem with this industry. Here's the service they recommend:
"The perfect music service offers a wide variety of genres, plenty of new releases, and every track on the albums in its catalogs; and it lets you burn songs to CDs or transfer tunes to portable players as often as you wish. Unfortunately, such a service doesn't exist yet. The closest alternative is eMusic, which lets you download as many songs as you want, with absolutely no copy protection. Unfortunately, eMusic carries only independent labels and won't interest those who prefer mainstream bands. For tunes of a more popular variety, turn to RealOne MusicPass or Pressplay."
Check out the RealOne review, where CNET rates the service a 7 out of 10. That's generous, compared to the 93% of 63 user opinions that give it a thumbs down. One of the positive reviewers doesn't even use RealOne for what should be the main purpose - purchasing and listening to digital music. Instead, the person says it's "not a bad subscription to preview music before you buy the CD." Talk about missing the point. I shouldn't have to pay to preview any music, thank you very much.
Then head over to the Pressplay review, which gets a 6 out of 10 rating. At least more users like the service than not, but check out CNET's list of bads for this product: "Limited music selection; CD burning is limited; awful search function; no Macintosh version; low streaming bit rates; no premium content." Tell me again why I would pay them money?
The handy dandy Feature Comparison Chart is nice, and CNET even tested the catalogs of each by comparing holdings of 10 artists from multiple genres. They used some interesting selections, too. Unsurprisingly, only one service had titles from half of the artists (BurnItFirst didn't have a single one). Of sixty boxes in the table, 17 say yes, they have content by that artist. I'll do the math for you - that's 28%, which is pretty sad.
So even if you want to be a legitimate consumer, there's really nowhere for you to go to hand your money over to the record labels. If that "perfect music service" ever comes along and you switch to it, you will most likely lose the majority (if not all) of the titles you've accumulated to date with one of these existing services.
Here's a tough call: which is in a sorrier state at the moment - ebooks or online music services? Difficult to say, although at least there's a market for online music right now. Too bad the record labels don't want to exploit it. [Jenny Levine: Tech Goddess]
10:44:09 AM 
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