Its nice,but here’s the rub.
I like japanese and french music…but because I live in Australia, the internet store only covers this country and therefore it wont find what it should really be looking for. Regionality on an internet download site is so last century…..so I’m stuck with importing the real thing for a while longer.

Have you noticed that renting and subscription is the choice of companies everywhere? That is because it is great for them and horrible for you! Sign up for slavery – never own anything / work for nothing.

At the end of the day, you should own something for your labor and intelligence. Pandora is great for discovering new music – I listen every day at work. When you find some song you love, go purchase it and own it forever (if you back it up!).

J: Because I am not interested in millions of songs but instead less than about 1,500. (actually there is only like 900 on my iPhone right now) I like repetitive and I like to own/burn/backup the music. Renting not so much. I’m sure it fits some folks needs, just not mine.

I’m more impressed by Pandora. I mean how hard is it really for iTunes to serve up music that you like from your own library? Besides, I suspected iTunes did this all along. I was never convinced that shuffle play was totally random. I think iTunes has some secret algorithm to program playlists based on some artificial mood.

Why are you afraid of renting millions of songs for less than the price of a CD per month?

.99 a song works perfectly for my tastes and so far the Genius playlist feature is pretty accurate to my fairly diverse collection of Christian contemporary, gospel,classical,folk and Christmas music. Very impressed.

The day I decide to rent music from Rhapsody, Apple or anyone else is the day I paint myself purple, wear a bowl of fruit on my head and dance the samba.

I have to say I’m with TUAW on this one – in fact I did a note on my own blog about it (http://txa1265.blogspot.com/2008/09/apples-new-genius.html)

Of course, my picks were obscure avant-garde jazz, but to have it select Pink, Rihanna and Jason Mraz … heck, just dumping a bunch of generic jazz would have been helpful.

What I don’t mention is that selecting some other stuff in my list – Pete Townsend, Joni Mitchell, – came up *only* with other songs by those artists. Miles Davis was the first one that yielded anything useful … except that I had selected ‘Gondwana’ from his way out there 1975 piece Pangaea … and it recommended stuff like ‘Stella by Starlight’ by Miles and Trane …

Apparently the Genius is part of the ‘Dumbest Generation’ of digital illiterati :D

Get a Rhapsody subscription. Stop spending 99 cents per song.

I’m not terribly impressed. It’s an upgrade of smart playlists (which should be an improvement) but the store recommendations is just a re-implementation of the now deceased “MiniStore” – instead of being on the bottom of iTunes, now it’s on the right. yawn.

Genius is doing terrible with my music. Example: most of my library is Country music and comes from imported CDs; the genre is correctly identified by iTunes. Only one or two albums were downloaded through Amazon. No matter what country song I use to seed the Genius with, it returns the same playlist consisting of the seed song and all 17 tracks of the latest country album I imported. Every. Single. Time. Hmmmm….. basically, it gives me a playlist of the newest Sugarland album… I already have a playlist for that. ;)