FINDING BURNABLE TRACKS:

* When v2.0 was installed I had albums from several non-classical artists in My Library, including Chico Hamilton, Deep Forest, Jesse Cook, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Linkin Park, Norah Jones, Pink (don't ask), Rachelle Ferrell, Ronny Jordan, and William Orbit. Of these, Linkin Park was the only artist with burnable tracks.

* A small red "burn" icon, supposed to appear "throughout the service," does not appear next to artist names on Key Artists or Most Popular Artists lists--you must drill down to a page dedicated to that artist before learning whether the artist is burnable. Nor does the icon appear in the track control panel when a burnable track is playing as part of a station mix. So, burnable material is hard to find. I achieved some success (and fun) by searching the service by song title, a method that spins out matches by many artists. Following the burn icon from there is rewarding. In my preliminary experience with Rhapsody v2.0, I've found artists to be either entirely burnable (all tracks) or entirely unavailable for burning.

* High-profile participants: Linkin Park, Eminem.

* The "Buy CD" link still lurks on album pages featuring burnable tracks, in an ironic denial of imminent realities. This is the kind of service that, when mature, will drive packaged CDs toward oblivion.

UPSHOT AND PROGNOSIS:

This is impulse buying! Tempting, compelling, addictive. We've got a taste of the future now. Notice that Rhapsody keeps delivering the most legitimate glimpses of true celestiality. This new version, as it stands today, is a fleeting glimpse to be sure, with barely enough burnable material to open this service for business. But I'm glad Listen didn't wait, just as I delighted in the initial, spotty rollout of Rhapsody. Yes, the process is ass-backwards: I want to pay for downloads that I can burn, not burns that I can rip. But either way, unsecured music files are delivered to a disc, ready for manipulation and transportation.

The sparse burnable catalog is a serious problem that must be rectified quickly, before disappointment sets in and interest fades, if Rhapsody is to gain any marketplace traction with this new gambit. Imagine ... I download maybe one gigabyte of music every month from EMusic, and nobody makes a dime. Here, I'm lusting to spend per-unit money, in an environment that presumably offers everyone involved a decent split. But there's almost no product to choose from! I want to be addicted. I'm dying to create and burn dozens of compilation albums drawn from Rhapsody's worthy catalog. This is not a time for the content owners to be short-sighted boneheads.....