I talked about this a little over a year ago.  I was pretty gung-ho about URGE, the music service offered by MTV and Microsoft.  It seamlessly integrated into Windows Media Player 11, could be used on up to 3 computers, and sync tunes to both my Windows Mobile smartphone, and my wife’s Nokia 5300 XpressMusic as well as other "Plays for Sure" WMA media devices.

At the time, things transpired that I didn’t "pull the trigger" on the service.  Now I’m glad I didn’t.  Real’s Rhapsody has absorbed URGE and all the reasons I was looking at the service have evaporated.  The devices I would like to use are "possibly" supported, I have to install *another* media player, and I have to manually copy the music to the devices.

Too much bullshit.

I’ll stick with buying the actual, physical CD-ROM of the artist in question and ripping the audio tracks to lossless WMA.  Disk space is cheap – 1TB for $100 – and I have been using Orb for some time to spread my digital media where I want it.  I’ll continue to do so.

This is the kind of crap that online services are going to do to their customer base.  I can’t use the service based on their offerings, I need a service that caters to my wants and needs.  I’ll keep my cash and spend it directly on the artist in question.

Maybe you’ve already figured this out, maybe you’re content with the offerings and wonder why I can’t see the value in it.  I can see the potential value in online music services, but it has to be on my terms – not theirs.