The short answer is 'No'. But there are streaming radio stations and music bundled as a podcast that allow you some access to music you haven't purchased. I have satellite in the car which provides me a sampler of music from genre's I like.
As mentioned, no apple doesn't 'do' subscription services. Which, honestly, IMHO are worse than DRM laden music.
Does it? You're renting music... At the end of the day, I may have an iPod full of oldies, but I like to dust some of them off now and again to listen to.
Foobar, Songbird, even the Zune software, just to name a few. Music store appreciation aside, the iTunes software itself is pretty shoddy. People jump up to defend it just because they don't know any better (or, as is more common, they feel the urgent need to defend Apple as if it's something personal), and that's ok.
I just don't see it this way. I like that iTunes synchronizes my calendar, contacts, and audio with no fuss. Since I use my iTouch as a PDA this is really nice.
What is the shoddy part of I tunes? I have used it for years and found it more stable than for example MS word
On a Mac or a PC? Vastly different performance on a PC than a Mac. I've seen & used songbird for a while, but overall liked iTunes better for organization and full integration of calendars, contacts, etc. Dunno.. I guess it's a personal preference thing.
fine for "simple" tagging, but nothing (not foobar or songbird) gives me the flexibility of tag&rename (for pc) or mediarage (for osx) if i need to do something more complex (like file renames based on tags... or tagging based on filename, etc.) memory footprint compared to winamp/foobar? yeah, but it's also a more complex app. i have a minimum of 4gb on each of my machines, so it's never been an issue. not sure what your issue with DB management is, either. it's a (relatively) simple xml file compiled into a binary... you can even manually edit the xml if you feel the need.
None of which run on OS X as well as Windows, which, believe it or not, is important to a lot of people, myself included. Criticizing people's choice of software is a bit silly, personal preference and convenience play large roles. What's good or even useful for someone may not be for another person. If the "technically best" software always won in the marketplace we'd not be running Windows, Microsoft Office and a lot of other software where the competition had better products but ultimately lost the battle of the pocketbook. And the flip side of the "defending iTunes" coin is that some people are just Apple haters, for no rational reason. Not lumping you into that category, you seem to know what you like, although you did attack Apple earlier for charging a 30 cent premium for DRM-free songs, when it's really not their choice to do so, they're forced to do it by the labels.
We know you's-a-ho. itunes is the AOL of music software. Folks in the know look at it with the same disgust. Then again, there are noobs still blissfully using AOL software. http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/music-services/
