I've tried all of these.
Emusic is great, the only problem is they didn't have any music i wanted.
also the mp3 files arent' the greatest quality. but overall it was a good service without any popular music.
Pressplay was slick and easy to use, although with far too many holes in the catalog to be truly useful. even many universal and sony artists weren't there. like cable tv, they didn't have too many current hits, and sometimes only one song from an album. The download countdown is just annoying and prohibits you from exploring and discovering new music.
I don't think anyone is ever going to go for a service with a set number of downloads per month. the best part of these things is to discover new music, but when you only have so many it kind of prohibits you.
and the streaming is terrible.
Musicnet was awful, impossible to use, slow, and annoying. I hate the new realone player, it's prettier than mj but that's where it ends.
again the catalog was tremendously incomplete. and with the download countdown right there on the player, how can you not think about it.
musicmatch is just a custimized radio with artists you like, kinda like launch.
the sound is good, it's ok if you like radio. for me it seemed to play just the same 10 artists all the time, of which i already had all of their cds.
Rhapsody was by far my favorite. It makes the music feel free. I wasn't ever counting downloads or listens.
It's a streaming service (although not really since the files are stored locally in a cache on your hard drive)
The sound was pretty good (128WMA).
It was the closest thing to listening to my music on mj.
I cancelled my subscription becuase there just wasn't enough content, everything on there that i liked i already have on my harddisk. If there were some more real music on it i would have so much more fun discovering new music.
If this service had all of the music and current and new albums, i would easily subscribe today.
Unlimited listening to whatever i want however many times i want. In my opinion this is the model that should win. It's the closest one to the free napster experience. It's even easier than emusic because you don't have to download any files. you have easy and instant access to everything.
the only problem is portability. but for $10/month to listen to any song would be a good deal. anything i wanted to own i could buy a cd of. most of the cds i buy i don't listen to that often after a few months anyway, and even if i did want to listen, it would always be there for absolutely no incremental cost if i was still a subscriber.
hope that was useful.
Veken