Music subscription sites have never really taken the industry by storm. Though it seems like a cool idea to have access to an endless amount of music for a fee, iTunes and illegal downloading simply make sites like Rhapsody useless. So it’s no surprise that earnings for subscription sites are steadily decreasing, a nice start but not much else.
Billboard is reporting that Rhapsody finished the first quarter of 2010 with 650,000 subscribers. It’s a 3.7% decrease from the fourth quarter in 2009, and an 18.8% decrease from 2009’s first quarter. The article also mentions how competitor Spotify has 300,000 paying subscribers and 7 million free users.
You can read Billboard’s full report here. The piece pretty much says it best: “so much potential but so few paying customers.”
