AOL Music Now Relaunches Music Service

Planetrudy writes "Reuters reports that AOL has launched a new version of its Music Now subscription service. It's web-based, slick, performs well (fast page loads and downloads), and contains over 2.5M songs and 'thousands of videos.' This launch seems to be in line with AOL's 'tearing down the wall around the garden' strategy."

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[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.musicnow.com/ [musicnow.com]

Re:ooops, NOT 10 Million SONGS

[jb.hl.com]

Most free trials of subscription services are like that. They tend to work on the basis that if you don't like the service, you'll cancel before the trial runs out. Same with magazine subscription offers.

Nothing to see here folks, move along...

[DreadfulGrape]

Sorry, no sale. Three reasons:

1) It's still pay-to-play (you stop paying, songs stop playing)
2) Won't play on 78% of the players in circulation (i.e. iPods)
3) It's AOL, for God's sake

Only in the U.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

In bold red text at the top of the page: "At this time, AOL Music Now is only available for use within the United States."

What a nice thing to see the first time I visit.

Bad encoding. No thanks.

[Eq 7-2521]

I don't know how this is possible, but the encodings sound *worse* than XM streams. It's WMA, so of course it's going to sound bad at any bitrate below about 150kbps, but the clips I listened to were around 32. Why do they even bother?

Re:Apple Tax

[JimDaGeek]

Stop paying for iPods and eventually they'll "stop playing" for you portably.

No they won't because you _own_ that copy. You are allowed to burn an audio CD and from there you can convert to whatever the new audio codec is to work on whatever device you want.

I don't personally buy any music with DRM so I am not saying Apple's method is "better". I am just stating that with Apple and iTMS you actually own your copy and you don't have to pay an MS-Tax/AOL-Tax/Napster-Tax/Etc to continue to listen to your purchased audio.