If your car stereo does have an auxiliary option where you can plug in your iPhone or other smartphone device, you don’t need to invest in or carry a large CD collection to keep your young travelers entertained. Several audio entertainment services such as Pandora and Rhapsody offer on-the-go options. With audio download services such as Audible, you can download books and stories in advance and take them with you on your portable MP3 music device or your smartphone. Here we’ll look at three leading services – Pandora, Rhapsody, and Audible.
Pandora is a service that allows you to enter an artist, song, or album that you like and it will then play a recording from that artist if it has the rights to do so. Then, Pandora will play recordings that fit the same profile as the artist, song, or album you’ve initially selected. This capability enabled by Pandora’s powerful Music Genome database, in which Pandora listeners, volunteers, and employees contribute input that helps to define artist and song profile matches.
The great news about Pandora is that it’s absolutely free. You’ll just want to make sure that you have an unlimited data plan with your smartphone service provider. Pandora also has access to a wide selection of children’s music and children’s stories. It’s really wonderful if you want to sample from a wide variety of stories and music and perhaps you will find something that you hadn’t heard of before that you really like. This is the the beauty of Pandora’s music genome database.
The downside of Pandora is that you don’t have complete control over what you can hear next (though, you can skip over a certain number of songs/stories to get to the selection that Pandora serves up next). You can also give a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” to any selection. Pandora will remember this and will influence what gets played for you later on.
Rhapsody allows you to listen to any recording available in its music library - over 1,000,000 albums. Its on-the-go service is now available for several different smartphones, including the iPhone. The cost is $14.99/month. The key benefit to Rhapsody is that you have complete control over what you listen to (again, as long as your selections are available in Rhapsody’s library).
Just as is the case with Pandora, it’s nice that you can listen to something without the commitment of paying for a CD in advance. If you listen to a story, song, or album and don’t like it, you haven’t spent any incremental money (besides your flat subscription fee) to hear it. If you do like it, you can add it to a playlist within Rhapsody to easily access it again. The downside to the Rhapsody service that you should consider in advance, is that if you ever decide to cancel your subscription, your access to all of the music and stories you’ve been listening to completely disappears. The reality is that you don’t own any of the music and stories, you’re just borrowing them.
Audible is a very different service from the first two in that you are using the service to purchase audio stories and books that you then own. It’s essentially the iTunes equivalent for books and stories. Audible has several different service options, including an option where you receive one “credit” per month for $14.95. The credit is good for just about any audio book or set of stories in its catalogs.
It’s not a bad pricing model, but the challenge is that the price point for children’s stories is typically on the lower end of the scale, so you are not getting a significant savings when you consider the price point for buying the children’s story CD individually without the Audible subscription. However, with your subscription, you also do receive discounts on other books and story sets should you purchase more than one per month (since you would use your “credit” for your first selection). So, it actually does work out such that if you are purchasing several books and story sets, you can build a significant savings vs. purchasing each book on CD individually.
Audiobooks also does have an entire line of Children’s books and stories, called Audible Kids. So there is plenty to choose from and the quality of the download is very good.
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