So for anyone who has ever known me or read this blog will know I am an advocate of music subscription (and infact don’t even mind DRM in that case). I had signed up and used the Urge music service and was extremely happy with it up until like November when they moved to Rhapsody. Now in theory this sounds horrible, but ironically for me this wasn’t that bad as the MP3 player I already owned (Sandisk Sansa) and my tivo have Rhapsody support so it wasn’t a big inconvenience in anyway (infact Urge never supported Tivo). However after 2 months of using the service I am ready to say goodbye. The player is an absolute piece of shit. I won’t get into the nitty gritty but between not being able to install it on a bunch of my computers (no 64-bit support – which by the way isn’t clearly stated, I spent days “debugging”), adding music from their catalog to my playlist only for them to suddenly “not have it” and the lack of a last.fm client has pushed me over the edge. I am done.

Now I bet that part of my willingness to switch also comes from the fact that I am getting older and I don’t “add” music to my collection that often. For 15 bucks a month I can add 15 songs from Amazon to my collection. 15 songs that I own – DRM free thank you Mr. Jobs. Keeping in mind my current collection is around 24 thousand I have everything I already want to listen to and I can add 15 songs a month I should really be set.

The only inconvenience with this was that I would have to carry around a harddrive if I travelled, but recently finding anywhere.fm, I am in the process of uploading my 24k songs for complete internet accessibility. So now I have internet access, access at home (both on my tivo and xbox360) and on my mp3 player… and I can use whatever player I want (Songbird – yes I know, still no last.fm, but it is on the way in the next couple weeks).

I still crave a subscription service with a quality catalog and a decent level of universal accessibility, but until that happens I have the next best thing.