Rhapsody 2.0 - Page 3

* 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.....

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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