CD Rental Service Offers Free iPod for Charter Membership

by , 1:15 PM EDT, September 23rd, 2004

A new service called Ongo Bongo is offering a free iPod mini to people who sign up as charter year-long members. Ongo Bongo is a Netflix-style music CD rental service that allows you to rent up to four music CDs at a time, and to keep them as long as you wish, and as long as your membership is active. People who prepay a year's membership to the not-yet launched service, for US$264, are being offered a free iPod mini. From the company:

As a special offer to our new customers we will give you a brand new Apple iPod Mini for FREE! The Apple iPod Mini is our FREE (after mail in rebate) gift to you for joining the Ongo Bongo music network.

This offer is contingent upon a 12 month pre-paid membership to the new Ongo Bongo music rental network. The normal cost of this service is $22/month for a total of $264/year. Now you can get all of this for a one time payment. With NO additional costs or fees during the 12 month membership.

With the Ongo Bongo music network you can now rent ALL the music CDs you want and keep them as long as you want. With NO late fees or due dates. Just tell us what you want and we will ship the CDs to your home for FREE. You can listen to them as much as you want, anywhere you want, for as long as you want. When you are finished listening, just return them to us for FREE in our prepaid envelopes and as soon as we get them we will send you even more of the music CDs you want to listen too.

So now you can listen to all of the music you want for the cost of buying 1 or 2 CDs a month. And if you act right now you will get the best portable MP3 music player in the world to play them on!

The company's Web site notes that iPod availability will be limited according to availability from Apple. We reported this morning about another company giving away free iPod minis that says it can't get them fast enough.

You can find more information on Ongo Bongo at the company's Web site. We found the site through Engadget.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA try to smash these folks out of business. Movie rentals are one thing because most folks don't have the ability or storage capacity to rip and store many, if any, movies. Music CDs, of course, are easily ripped, making this service a potential nightmare for the industry. It will be interesting, however, to see if the recording industry can do anything about Ongo Bongo, even if it wants to.

Also, as one of Engadget's readers noted, music CD rentals have been quite widespread in Japan for some time, but this is the first such service we have noted in the US. If you know of any, drop a note in the comments below.