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Sony has been going through some rough times lately. Their support of SOPA didnt exactly do the company any favors. However, Sony has now gotten the idea that they want to compete with Spotify and other similar services by launching their own, called Sony Music Unlimited. 

While I generally agree that competition is a good thing, I just have the urge to express my opinion on this.

Read on for more..

Without going into to too many details about what Sony Music Unlimited is and isnt, I figured I could just sum it up quickly.

Firstly, the things that look promising is the fact that the music available to subscribers is pretty massive with around 15 million tracks available currently. Its also nice that the goal here seems to be to make the whole thing as hardware and OS independent as possible by making it browser based. And while there are Android apps for it now, iOS availability is still a negatory.

Now, on to the downsides. 

First of all, you have to pay to get anything out of it. You can pick between two different subscriptions. You can pay about half of a Spotify Premium fee and all you get is basically a regular online radio where you can skip the tracks you dont want, but otherwise have no control over what music you're listening to. Go all out and pay full premium and you get, hold on, 48 kbit/s AAC+ v2. Sony argues that the compression used by AAC+ v2 is so fantastic that sound quality doesnt suffer as much as MP3 with the same bit rate would. While I'm sure there's some truth to the statement, there is no way it will come close to the sound quality that Spotify offers, with their Ogg Vorbis Q9 320kbit/s. 

So in the end, Sony offers a service that has significantly worse sound quality. And you have to pay top dollar to get any real use out of it, AND there is no iOS support yet, and from the looks of it, it will take a while before there will be any, if there ever will. Now consider Sony's track record for malicious DRM protections, rootkits and SOPA support, and I see absolutely no reason why anyone should subscribe.

Feel free to disagree!