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Music Purchases require subscription

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by andeanderson

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to be listened to?

I just received a RIO Carbon 5GB MP3 player. Being new and a late comer to the world of MP3 Players I decided, for a change, to read the owners manual before trying to use it.

Did I ever receive a surprise! If I start to use the RIO PlaysForSure Subscription service I have to continue to use it forever to be allowed to listen to the music I downloaded using it?

After reading and hearing a lot of complaints about the Sony root-kit mess I was surprised I had not heard any complaints about the Audio Subscription requirements for Music downloads.

I read in the owners manual for my RIO Carbon the following: "...but if you stop paying your monthly subscription fee and the subscription expires, the tracks cannot be played." And, that this is now a standard practice for all Internet Music Download Subscription Services.

That tells me I have to maintain all subscription services forever if I want to continue to listen to music I have purchased through them. If they go out of business or change ownership or even if I change MP3 players then my usage of the music purchased through them will be disabled.

What did I miss? Or, has everyone just accepted and resigned themselves to just leasing, not purchasing, music for limited time periods?

Why haven't I seen or heard any out-crys about this subscription service requirement? Talk about rip-offs!!!!

2 replies

by andeanderson

I planned on buying an iPod and then Apple changed the design and shape of the iPod to keep us from using any of the current accessories with their new models. So now I will wait until, or to see if, the accessories will be modified to fit the new size.

Besides, I didn't have to pay anything for the Rio Carbon. I won it from Micro$oft in a Survey contest and do not intend to use the RIO online download service.

I was just curious why there was such an out-cry against Sony but not one peep about the scheme which only allows you to lease/rent the media download for as long as you use a specific online service.

That goes along with the approach which was looked at for use in CD's and DVD's, to only allow them to be played so many times and then make them unusable.

Microsoft does that with some of their OS releases now.

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