RealRhapsody Review

Full RealRhapsody Review

Summary

With a good search box, quick and convenient downloads as well as a good selection of music titles; it's easy to see why Real Rhapsody is well known in the industry. However, many users will be seriously turned off by its DRM protection associated with each monthly subscription.

The Problems of DRM Protection and Rhapsody

Real Rhapsody offers two kinds of music download services:

• Subscription-based: $12.99 - 14.99 per month
• Pay-per-song: $0.99 per song / $9.99 per album

While Rhapsody's subscription-based music download service enables music lovers to have access to unlimited music downloads from Rhapsody's more than 5 million music titles, each song available through the subscription-based music download service is protected by DRM technology.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) in an access control technology used by digital media content creators and publishers to limit how their content is being used. With a Real Rhapsody monthly subscription, you will be able to download as many songs and albums as you want from its extensive library, but (and it's VERY BIG ONE) you won't be able to play them once your subscription is over or cancelled. So basically, to keep listening to the songs you downloaded from Real Rhapsody, you will always need to pay the $12.99 to $14.99 monthly subscription fee. Otherwise, your entire music library built with Real Rhapsody will be completely useless.

However, if you're not really keen on unlimited music downloads, and actually don't mind paying for each song you download, Real Rhapsody also offers a pay-per-song music download service. Song costs $0.99 and albums are $9.99. Songs and albums purchased through the pay-per-song service are DRM-FREE. So you'll be able to use them even after you stop using Real Rhapsody. But the downside to the pay-per-song music download service is that there are significantly fewer songs available than through the subscription download service. As a consequence, you might not find exactly what you're looking for with Real Rhapsody's pay-per-song.

Smart Music Search Engine

Downloading music from Real Rhapsody is actually convenient and fast. This is especially true with Real Rhapsody's search box. The latter has a built-in smart music search engine that provides suggestions of songs, artists and albums as you're tying in your search keywords. This is great for music exploration and especially if you're not sure on what you is looking for.

But the Real Rhapsody is not perfect. It doesn't recognize misspellings. Thus, it will often return no results if you misspell an artist's name or song title.

Overall, Real Rhapsody is a good medium to download music from the Internet because of its smart music search box, fast download and wide selection. However, the DRM protected songs offered on the subscription plan is more than frustrating and will most probably push many to consider other unlimited music download websites.