Last week Rhapsody, the pioneering online subscription music service, announced it was opening up a DRM-free MP3 store. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a technology used to control access to digital media files (*** more below). They say they are ’embracing the iPod’ after years of competition.  This puts them in competition with the behemoth iTunes Music Store and Amazon.com’s DRM-free music store among others.  So what’s the deal?

When the announcement came out, there was a great stirring in the ‘anything but Apple’ community – these are the folks who were very happy when Apple almost died a decade ago and bemoan and belittle every success the company has.  One strong contention that group has is that iTunes DRM is only for iPods, effectively locking other MP3 players out of the booming music download market.  So for that group any place that launches a store with DRM-free tracks is a winner.  There is an interesting intersection of interests in the ‘anything but iTunes’ community – there are anti-Apple folks, anti-DRM folks, and music industry folks who don’t like the amount of power that Apple has over that market.  One somewhat humorous note on that: despite a history of Steve Jobs publicly battling record execs to keep prices low as CD prices kept climbing, the music biz has actually managed to convince some in the anti-DRM/Apple crowd that they want the flexibility to price certain things lower.  Uh-huh … they get 70 cents of each iTunes song, complain that it isn’t enough, and we’re supposed to believe that they will sell stuff for 50 cents?  These folks must surely be full of anti-Apple vitriol and empty of perspective and Google-Fu to buy into that … but anyway …

At the time of the announcement I took a quick look, registered on the site and thought that the registration had failed because it spat out an error.  I registered because they had announced a free album offer, though I honestly didn’t look into it enough to know what restrictions there might be other than it was only for the first 100,000 people to register.  But as I was checking email on July 4th I was doubly surprised – I found my ‘free album’ registration notice in my Mac mail spam folder … and also discovered that it expired that very same say!

Time to hit the store and see what they had!

The first thing I found was that DealNews had a notice that the Herbie Hancock Box Set was on sale on Rhapsody for $1.  That had me sold in a second – this is a 4CD collection of Herbie’s work during the 70’s and 80’s and includes some real gems of the period.  I had a bunch of it already, but at $1 … how could I go wrong?

So I searched around some more … and didn’t find that much of interest.  I added John Mclaughlin’s new Floating Point .  Not terrible, but it could have been called ‘what’s the point’ … and I am once again reminded that the last time I really *loved* something of his was in 1984 with the Mahavishnu group with Jonas Hellborg.  (the 1986 Adventures in Radioland was OK, but certainly not up to the promise of stuff he was doing live at the time when I saw them)

Finally … I came upon the Steve Reich Box Set.  Now this is really just amazing … ***10 CD’s *** of the minimalist master at work … just mind-boggling stuff.  I have skimmed the whole thing and am now listening in detail.  What amazing stuff – from early tape-based musique concrete to experimental piano and drumming to fully developed works, everything is worth a listen.

So I added 15 CD’s to my cart and checked out.  My total bill? $0.99.  So I was quite happy!

But after paying and starting the download process, I got to deal with some other issues.  Rhapsody packs up your stuff into a zip file for download, which is quite nice in general.  But when you have ~130 songs that take up ~16 hours at 256kb bit rate … you are getting some large files!  So I broke it down and did the Herbie and Mclaughlin first, then cut the Reich stuff in half.  But even with that, the service doesn’t identify how large the files are.  Apparently there is a download assistant – but it must only be for the PC since it never even came up on my Mac.  Next time I make a purchase I’ll do it on the PC to see the difference.

The next problem: MP3 id tags.  Floating Point was fine – all songs had their track number correct and the album art was fine.  The Steve Reich stuff was also fine – although they had labeled the songs from 1-83 with no CD delineation.  Oh well, at least the original order was maintained.  But the Herbie Hancock Box was a mess.  The track numbers were all fine – for the CD’s they were on.  The problem was that there was no indicator of which CD they came from; my solution was to go to Amazon and look at the track listing and add the information manually.  Rather a pain for 4 CD’s!  Also, there were multiple genres listed.  Now I know Herbs tends to wander about, but for a box set, just pick one and stick with it – I don’t care if you call it jazz, funk, fusion or whatever!

My final beef with the new service applies to Amazon as well – you know those nifty booklets you get with an iTunes album purchase?  You don’t get them here.  It is the same price yet you are getting less content – all in the name of being DRM-free.  For me it isn’t worth the haddle – I have *never* had to fiddle with tracks from iTunes the way I have with these from Rhapsody.  Nor have I had that problem with Amazon’s MP3 store.  It isn’t a big deal, but for a service that has been around for 9 years it still feels rather amateurish.

I think another issue is that Rhapsody as a brand is marginal at best, invisible at worst.  There is an article about this very subject that came out recently.  My indicator that the launch wasn’t all that successful was that on the 4th, I thought my ‘free album’ thing had failed and tried to register under a different email address, and everything was going through fine except that it detected my old account and said I already had a free album.  It directed me to my account where I finally found the credit, but it occurred to me: this promotion has been running for the whole week, and geeks in general snap up free stuff very quickly – how is it possible that there are slots still open?

My Rhapsody experience was generically positive, mainly because I got a metric ton of music for the price of a song!  But the real test of a service like this is how I use it: and so far all I have done is scan the RSS feeds looking for more sweet bargains.  Whereas with Amazon and iTunes I will regularly scan their listings, searching their sites for things that are new or I am thinking about, Rhapsody isn’t that friendly in either browse of search mode – I came up with Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue under Fusion.  Um. No.

Another interesting thought came to me with all of this.  Rhapsody and their subscription service has been at the center of discussions represented well by the article ‘The End of the Age of Ownership‘.  Yet here they are trying to push ownership hard – and many supporters of their subscription model are cheering them right along.  I understand that it is sound practice to cover as many business models as possible, but I think this is a sign that the ‘age of ownership’ isn’t as dead as some would have you think.  I certainly see the use case for subscriptions, even if my listening habits are directly at odds with that model.

What about you?  Where and how do you get your music?  What are you learning from your kids about all of this?  How do you feel about these different sites and services?

*** A note on DRM: Digital Rights Management is anything done to limit or prevent access to a digital file of any sort.  It can be an encrypted file system that won’t allow access to files on a laptop that is stolen without the proper password, or a wrapper around a music or game file that requires certain access criteria to allow it to be used.  It is often used interchangeably with copy protection, but there is generally a difference in that copy protection installs files or programs to monitor use and DRM has the rights management embedded in the file itself.  The concern is that DRM is more onerous than what was done in the pre-digital age, and makes it entirely possible that through no fault of their own consumers will not be able to use something they purchased.  For example – if you own a game through Steam or Direct2Drive or EA, or music through iTunes or Zune or MSN, and need to either re-install the game or put the music on a new computer you purchased, you need to connect to the authentication server to gain permission.  If any of those companies goes out of business – or decides to stop support – you will not be able to go forward.  For a specific example, a few months back Microsoft announced they were shutting down the MSN Music authentication servers in August – but based on the outcry and backlash extended it for two years.  Either way, the service is dead and the support is on life support and going away soon.

Tags: Misc