First, an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch application version of the Rhapsody service is now available and the big news is it delivers all the value of a subscription service – access to the entire catalog Rhapsody’s amassed over the years – a single, predictable monthly payment and portability – play it on your PC, play it on your iPhone or iPad or through your Sonos system (or whatever hip/cool/homegrown solution you have for multiroom audio).

And it’s $10/month. (Rhapsody Premier Plus is $14.99 and enables the use to run it on three separate mobile devices.) 

So anyhow, much has been made of the fact here and here, that the newly single Rhapsody got to market first the feature competitors such as MOG’s All Access  are still developing, and others like Spotify have deployed (at least in the U.K., the company’s still somewhat coy about when, but in my mind it’s still “if” they come to the U.S.): the ability of a Rhapsody subscriber to create a secure cache of songs – be it a set of playlists, entire albums, or a genre – on an iPhone or iPad and play that cache without having the device connected to the Internet.

Is this a big deal? Well, sure, getting to market first with a solution that delivers what I believe most music consumers would think is an obvious capability has its advantages. But as a practical matter, MOG’s All Access – which will have a smartphone option available in the summer — was able to take advantage of a major shift in licensing terms and practices by the labels to create it’s PC/browser version of All Access. (Which is to say it’s an advantage but short-term because virtually all other services will negotiate similar deals.) The relaxing of license terms, and the onerous licensing fees many online music services have had to pay the labels, is as important as any of these new services.

Rhapsody, MOG’s All-Access and, probably, maybe, at some point, Spotify, are all important indicators that given a rich catalog of content, a reasonably simple set of interfaces and extensions to mobile/portable devices, consumers will pay for content.  The big “if” is IF the service offers an interesting experience. For everything else, iTunes was, at the time of launch, and remains to this day an online store. Apple creates a unique experience by seamlessly integrating PC-based software (iTunes), a set of unique and, so far, very popular pieces of hardware (iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, not to mention Macs).

So while maybe the ‘00s were about free content (as in portable and as in “free beer”), it would seem that the next decade of the 21st century will be about consumers paying directly for content experiences.

What users can do is seed a “station” based on a song or artist on their device. Soundtrckr then the system starts driving related songs from Soundtrckr’s seven-million-track catalog (licensed from the labels so they’re not paying a webcasting royalty), based on the usual elements: genre, artist, band, album etc., etc.  The added twist is that the playlists can be tagged to a location and the iPhone app can help users find fellow Soundtrckr’s and their playlists by location.

I started with a live track from a Los Lobos concert in 2005 in my hometown. What followed were some interesting, and by my ear and preferences, appropriate matches. (Like so many recommendation systems, some of the songs linked to the Los Lobos seed were just so obviously based on the highest-level, and therefore loosest relationship between artists. For example, there isn’t really a direct musical relationship between Los Lobos and Santana. We can chat offline about this if anybody would like to discuss.

Founder and CEO Daniele Calabrese said recently that the company looks to drive revenue from advertising, affiliate fees from driving sales to stores and services.

It all sounds interesting. The dynamic Calabrese’s team is trying to tap into – music’s power as social currency – has potential as a revenue driver. What remains to be seen is whether it develops into a standalone business or if it becomes an ingredient in a larger service offering from a content store or service, perhaps even a carrier.

Definitely one to watch in the intersection of social, mobile and music.

G1 users will be able to start paying to download from Amazon’s six-million-plus song catalog of DRM-free, 256kbps-encoded-songs whenever they’re in range of a WiFi connection. (Apparently, the OTA download dream is still, as yet, unrealized. In my opinion, that’s just as well.) Downloading songs from Amazon to the G1 via a WiFi connection seems  pretty straighforward. After that, the user then can synch the songs, via USB cable, back to their primary computer.  Not clear if there is some sort of auto-synch capability.  Actually hearing the music they buy on the device might be a bit more problematic.

Why? Because there are some odd things about this one.  According to  this story and thisstory , the device doesn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack or stereo Bluetooth capabilities.  Not to be too picky, but I find a 3.5mm headphone jack kind of important for  listening to music acquired from the “cloud.” On a portable device.  Another strange decision: apparently the G1 sports a mere 1GB of internal storage. (It reportedly does have an expansion slot.)

As a much anticipated product designed, or at least advertised to be a serious disrupter to the established mobile phone market and touted by the press in the past few months as a serious iPhone competitor, the Android G1 still seems more like a great idea only partially realized.

 But wait a minute, we’re about six years into the legitimate online music market, and the labels want to take us back to the days of physical media?

 Apparently, they do want to focus on physical.  For SanDisk, the motivations are easy to understand: another way to ship more packaged flash memory.  For the labels, however, the reasoning is a bit more elusive.  I believe what we’re seeing is the last gasp of the bundle for music. By throwing more “stuff” onto the microSD “album,” the industry is looking to make the package as attractive and profitable as possible.  I say that because my guess is that the unit pricing for a slotMusic card will be more than a CD.  Retail pricing for a slotMusic card has not been released and no availability date was announced today. SanDisk executives said they expect the slotMusic cards to be in the channel by the holiday buying season. (WalMart and BestBuy are the two retailers on board first. Interestingly, each has been mentioned in news reports as reducing the amount of square footage they dedicate to CDs.)  

SanDisk and the labels are touting slotMusic effort as the answer for what they claim is a significant number of music consumers who desire not just ownership of music bits on a hard drive but also the packaging everything else – liner notes etc. (SanDisk said the parties had done market research to support this claim but did not have the methodology, sample size etc. available when we spoke last week.) Some key benefits cited by the SanDisk executives:

·        The growing number of mobile phones with microSD slots

·        Instant gratification: The SanDisk argument is that “buying” a song online involves finding it, downloading it and synching it to a portable device. The “time to play” can be hours. With the slotMusic cards, one can buy them at retail and pop them in a device’s slot and play immediately.

·        As previously mentioned, no DRM and minimum encode rates will be 256kbps, with many planned to be released at 300kbps or higher.  (By comparison, most of the songs in Apple’s iTunes store are encoded at 128Kbps.)

To me, it remains an open question whether a significant number of consumers will actually respond to the notion of extending the old concept of the “bundle” even though the bundle can now include not only songs but also video, lyrics, and any number of items. It’s the songs consumers are after and today’s digital natives seem to be quite comfortable going out and acquiring that other information as needed.

It will be interesting to see if the slotMusic cards can become the ’08 holiday season’s must-have stocking stuffer or the latest example of a technology that misses a market shift.  

Then again, “green” consumers might be crossing it off their lists since it appears the retail packaging for the fingernail-sized microSD cards is about the same size as that of a CD.