I don’t know why all my music loving friends aren’t subscribers to Rhapsody Music. This morning I picked up the 8/8/8 edition of Entertainment Weekly and read the five reviews of new albums in their Music Review section. I then logged into Rhapsody and played each of those albums. Rhapsody had five for five. I can listen to these albums anytime I want and it’s completely legal and all I pay is $119 a year for the service. The albums were:
- Conor Oberst by Conor Oberst
- Fragile Future by Hawthorne Heights
- Lessons in Love by Lloyd
- Harps and Angels by Randy Newman
- Scars on Broadway by Scars on Broadway
Just to see how good Rhapsody is I grabbed the latest issue, and found six more reviews. Rhapsody had five of the six – missing out on Ra Ra Riot’s The Rhumb Line, but they had their EP, so that one might show up soon.
If I was paying by the song like most people, I would have already racked up $40 worth of songs this morning. And these are five albums I never would have bought if I had been flipping through CDs at a record store. And there have been tons of albums I’ve bought that I’ve liked much less than these albums. So far I like Hawthorne Heights and Conor Oberst best. I’m going through these online albums looking for standout songs – songs I will want to come back and listen to again.
That’s one of Rhapsody’s weaknesses – you have access to so much music that it’s overwhelming. I wished they had some kind of system to help me remember all these new artists. If they had a little scale that showed up while each song was playing I could rate them: _Forgettable _Good _Great _Fantastic, it would be easy to track them down later.
Rhapsody is better at providing new music than it is old music. I just got Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover 1967-2007 on DVD, complete digital editions of the magazines, over a thousand issues. I started with the first issue looking for albums that I’ve never heard of and never remembered at all. Rhapsody is not the place to find them. Back then albums came out on LPs, and most of them never got reprinted as CDs, much less brought forward to the digital age. However, if an old album is re-mastered on CD and sold today there’s a good chance it will show up on Rhapsody.
I show Rhapsody to my friends, and I write about it every so often, but I know damn few people who use the service. It’s amazing that such a great deal is ignored. I know young people prefer to steal their music, but Rhapsody is so cheap I can’t believe more kids don’t want to be legal.
The real drawback of Rhapsody is it doesn’t play on iPods. And for some reason Steve Jobs doesn’t want Apple to get into the subscription music business. I don’t put music on my iPod, but I do play music on my iPod touch through the Pandora app. Pandora is free, but random. I imagine that if I played Pandora long enough I’d eventually hear everything I can get on Rhapsody. I can’t believe Pandora isn’t more famous too. It’s a marvelous invention allowing Internet listeners build their own radio stations by starting each with a seed song and rating subsequent songs selected by Pandora.
Pandora’s Music Genome Project is technology designed to analyze what you like and give you more of it. I have a jazz station started with “Blue Rondo A Lo Turk” and a Dylanesque station seeded with “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and a 60s San Francisco sound station seeded with Quicksilver Messenger Service and a new alternative station started with Broken Social Scene. Pandora is a FANTASTIC system for discovering new tunes to love. Right now it’s playing David Bromberg’s live “Mr. Bojangles” on my Bryds station – now that’s a wonderful blast from the past.
And then there’s Deezer.com – free on demand music. I checked, and the David Bromberg song is there to play for free. Also, I check and three of the five albums from Entertainment Weekly mentioned above are available to play for free (Fragile Future, Scars on Broadway and Harps and Angels).
How can the music industry offer all this free music? Why does anyone buy songs? I don’t know. Over at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Gordon Van Gelder is asking the same questions about free short stories on the web. Maybe I’m out of touch because I actually pay for Rhapsody music and buy magazines with short stories. Will I be buying next year or the year after that?
There is no reason to buy music or short stories any more, not if you don’t want to, because there’s a wealth of great free material on the web. How is that going to change things? My wife and I paid $39 each to sit in the cheap seats at an outdoor Crosby, Stills and Nash concert a couple weeks ago. That’s more money than I ever spent on their LPs. We saw Jewel at the same place and prices, but that’s the two concerts I’ll go to this year. Susie also went to Dave Matthews and plans to see a couple more concerts. Can the music industry survive off of such sporadic support?
This is a great age for music lovers, but what kind of age is it for music creators?
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
Hi Jim,
I just wanted to point out that you can actually rate songs in Rhapsody. As you’re playing a song, look at the top right of the screen. You’ll see a scale ranging from 0 (a circle with a line through it) to 5 stars. Then later on you can come back to all of the songs and albums you’ve rated!
Lacy
Hey Jim: This column is great as it points out the strength of subscriber music. Of course Pandora is on the ropes according a post on CNET…they just aren’t going to be able to sustain because of the recent ruling by the FCC that online radio-like sites have to pay a higher rate than regular radio to artists (record companies really). As far as Rhapsody goes, it is a great way to find new music and sample it to see if you want it. However, I want total control with no death switch possible. Holding and opening a CD is concrete and that appeals to me. I do download free music…there is a ton free music, no all of which are lesser known bands, at download.com (part of the cnet empire). I have found some really good music there and they have every imaginable category to look at. What they don’t give you for free (most are not for free) you can still listen to for evaluation. Any hoo thanks for the deezer site information. When Y2K reallly hits, I’ll let you borrow my CDs. Snicker.
I am becoming increasingly surprised by how much music is available for free on You Tube. I just listened to all of Coldplay’s newest album on You Tube. (Rhapsody doesn’t like my desktop PC). I’m actually considering dropping Rhapsody simply because I am making huge playlists on You Tube for no money at all.
In fairness, it doesn’t compare to Rhapsody in that R has much more to offer, but there is still a lot of music on You Tube.
I used the EW issue a few months back that featured female artists to add a several new artists to my playlists. I like that they are doing this sort of thing.
Rhapsody is fine, and you don’t even have to subscribe to get 25 tunes that you can listen to for free (which you can also digitally record as you listen, but I’m sure that is not cool with The Man…;-). I like the way I can organize my music, including CDs, in iTunes, but I know I can do this in Rhapsody as well. One of the best things about Rhapsody is the feature that lets you capture videos off YouTube or anywhere else, for that matter. But, I have to admit, I still love good ol’ vinyl, which I can convert to CD easily, if necessary. I prefer to get older records on vinyl, as I recently wanted to get CSN&Y’s Four Way Street, and found the original LPs in excellent shape via Amazon. I just love holding that big double album open, carefully pulling out the record out of its sleeve, and placing the turntable needle gently on the first groove. Ahh…I am back in 1971!