Digital music: More options

If there are online music fans at your house, they now have more options - including free *and* for-sure legal. This week RealNetworks unveiled the new Rhapsody, TIME.com reports, which includes Rhapsody 25 (listen to 25 songs for free on a PC); Rhapsody Unlimited ($10/month to "rent" unlimited songs, listen to them on your PC for as long as you're a subscriber; or 89 cents/tune or $8.99/album to "own" and listen offline on the PC); and Rhapsody to Go (for $15/month, listen online, offline, or put music on an MP3 player or burn a CD). The "free" category represents something of an alternative to illegal file-sharing: 25 free "plays" a month (whether 25 songs or 25 plays of the same song). Of course, there are still restrictions. The number of MP3 players Rhapsody's tunes can be played on is limited, though Real says it has made its service compatible with the iPod. "For the moment, Real says it only supports the Creative Zen Micro and the iRiver H10, but if you already own a Dell Pocket DJ or one of iRiver's H300 series players, my educated guess is that they could work, too." All this is a good sign that online music retailers are aware that flexible, fluid music consumption is the goal for all those music fans out there. More than 300 news outlets covered this - see also Internet News.