I got a new car stereo a few months ago, a sleek-looking Alpine with some cool lights and the neat device of a cord that runs from the back of the unit into the glove compartment, to which one can hook up an iPod. The big selling points: a) You can operate the iPod from the front of the stereo, and b) you can see the title and artist readout on the unit as well.

The former works in adequate, if limited, fashion. As for the latter, what interests me about it is how, to see the artist or song title, you have to press a little button to the right of the readout, which cycles through the information about the song that’s playing. The amazing thing is that the cycle encompasses some eight or ten elements, most of which are strange numbers or gnomic messages like “LABEL” or “ALBUM” or “NO SUPPORT.” Of these, only three are useful to you the consumer: the song name, the artist name, and the album name. The rest is all gobbledygook or numbers, of interest to the stereo but not the owner f the stereo.

The contrast between that and what I would call the Google or Apple aesthetic is pretty extreme. I understand it’s a small thing; when I’m in the car I just put the thing on shuffle and skip the songs I don’t want to hear. But once in a while I want to check what it is I’m listening to, and then I sit there, in traffic, marveling that I have to hit a little button a half-dozen or more times just to find out what artist is playing.

Can you imagine Steve Jobs testing out a new Apple car stereo that did that? “What are these numbers?” he’d ask the designer.

“Well, when the stereo reads the iPod, it assigns each song a number, based on the directory the mp3 is in, its position in the hierarchy of that directory, and its…”

Jobs would then probably reach over and smack the designer, sharply, upside the head before explaining to him or her that they were selling car stereos to humans who just wanted to know the name of the song they were listening to, not the computer file’s position in the directory hierarchy.

Anyway, I was thinking about this in reading about the newest challenger to the iTunes Store, put together by RealNetworks, which owns Rhapsody, and MTV. There’s a NYT report here, the WSJ’s here (r.r.). Essentially, MTV is buying a piece of Rhapsody for a chunk of change (its unclear how much) and a commitment to flacking it unmercifully on the air. (There’s an iPhone challenge, too: Verizon phones will be able to play music from the service. )

This will be a fun, Zune-like business debacle to watch. MTV viewers will be subjected to endless prattle on the network (and, specifically, on the VMA’s in September) about the fabulous new “Rhapsody America” service. Anyone who tries to explain the advantages of this oddly named product will quickly get bogged own in explaining what a subscription service is; how you can buy certain songs under certain circumstances, which won’t play on an iPod but will play on Verizon™ phones; and how there are lots and lots of songs available, except for the ones that aren’t.

The subscription gambit isn’t worthless—there are those whose lifestyle or interest in music it suits, though I don’t know why they don’t just use Pandora—but it’s hard to see how this will be anything but a niche product for unsophisticated consumers who both a) have never seen an iPod ad and b) make consumer spending decisions based on advice from John Norris. I’m not saying they don’t exist, just that it’s not going to be an iPod killer.

The connection between this and my oddly featured Alpine car stereo is that I now look at the damn thing not as a suave addition to my car but more as something of an annoyance. It’s got a radio, of course, but there’s nothing on the radio I want to hear outside of NPR, which I’d just as soon podcast. I barely play CDs any more, too, and when I do have a disc in there it tends to be an mp3 disc.

In essence, I had to buy the thing in order to connect the iPod up to my car’s sound system, and basically I’ve discovered that the people who designed it didn’t take much time to examine how folks would actually use it. I’m quite sure I’m never going to buy such a product again, because it just seems to have been conceived and designed under a paradigm that is plainly out of date. Anyone who wants to compete with the iPod or the iTunes Store needs to come up with a device or a service that is even more lethally useful. You can tell from its inception that Rhapsody America won’t be it.