Illegal music downloads are still pretty easy to find. Although there are several legal pay-for music services out there, two years ago none seemed to really convince me that the service was worth paying money for. For the amount of time I’d have to put in to paying for something I could just as easily download it for free and not have any restrictions on the music file. The obvious key for legal online music companies to be successful is to make legal music so simple, so versitle, and so flexible that it’s worth paying the money for. In my opinion, these companies haven’t really hit that point until just recently. The legal online music community is finally at the place where I will gladly pay to use their services to save me the time and energy I’d otherwise put into illegal downloads.

Sometime around last year I subscribed to Rhapsody music service, a legal online music company, in striving to become a little more legal with my music downloads. I paid $8.95/month for unlimited access to all the streaming music my little heart could desire. The service was simple to use, I could easily have all my music syncronized on any computer, and I had the option to stream the music, saving me lots and lots of diskspace. The downside was that I could only listen to the music on a computer — I couldn’t transfer any of it to a portable mp3 player or burn them to CD without buying the track for $0.89 per song, which could obviously add up pretty quick.

Well, along with recent efforts to become completely legal with all my music, Rhapsody has added a new service that not only makes that possible for me, but also makes it worth the extra money. Now, for the cost of one album a month ($15), I can download and transfer an unlimited number of tracks to my 5 GB Creative Zen Micro mp3 player to take with me wherever I want. That’s somewhere around 1,500 songs I can now take anywhere for the price of one album a month. And the process is so simple: just connect the mp3 player to your computer, easily find the music you want (out of 1,000,000+ tracks available), drag it to your mp3 player, let it sync, and you’re good to go. I can also sync individual playlists or use the Creative Zen Micro as an external hard drive to store normal computer files. It’s not that I can’t find this music for free in other places, it’s just that now paying $15/month for such simplicity and ease of use is totally worth it.

So yeah, as I write this I am downloading hundreds of songs off Rhapsody and sync’ing it to my Zen Micro, all legally! Not that this makes anyone else excited besides me, but just thought I’d share anyway.

In other brief news, we leave for the missions trip a week from today. Oh so much planning and little details to remember and work out. Hopefully by the end of today I’ll finally have the bible studies finished and sent out to the leaders to review this week. It looks like we’ll have over 40 campers, which will make camp much different from last year when we only accepted 18. That’s 220% growth! Good thing all the Redeemer people are coming to help with that. Whew…

Also, Pastor Rol gave me the option of preaching on Memorial Day since he’ll be out of town. He usually arranges to bring in guest speakers when he’s away, but he asked me if I’d like to teach that Sunday instead. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to take his offer, but I just may. I would conduct the message much differently than a normal sermon because, one, I hate “preaching,” two, I always like to find new effective ways of doing things, and three, I can get away with doing weird things since I’m the youth pastor. ;) I think it’s kinda expected of me now anyway. :lol:

Okay, off to do laundry, food shopping, cleaning up around the apartment, and working on missions trip bible studies, and of course filling up my Zen Micro.

Posted on July 9, 2005