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June 30, 2008

music

Putting the ‘DRM’ in ‘drama’, day…er: Rhapsody no longer blue about lack of iPod support

Posted Jun. 30, ’08, 9:02 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Music

RhapsodyThe march towards DRM freedom continues apace. Joining the ranks of Amazon, Napster, and parts of iTunes is Rhapsody (home to the country’s largest subscription-based service). The joint venture between Real Networks and MTV has finally launched their MP3-based store (first mentioned about a year ago, though they appear to have ditched the bleedingly awful “Rhapsody America” moniker in favor of the marginally less ridiculous “Music Without Limits”) with over 5 million tracks from all four major labels. Strangely enough, my first two searches for songs—AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and The Fratellis’ “Flathead”—yielded only bluegrass covers of the songs; perhaps it should be called “Music With Some Limits, But Not That Many, Really”.

Rhapsody’s plan to take on the iTunes Store comes in a number of prongs: they’ve partnered with Yahoo! Music, the iLike Facebook application, and Verizon Wireless. And, of course, adopting MP3 means that they can finally sell tracks that work with the bajillion iPods already out there. Not unlike Amazon’s store, Rhapsody is even including a Windows downloader application that’ll automatically add your download tracks to iTunes—Mac users can apparently download their songs as ZIP files (thanks, guys).

How does this play with Rhapsody’s current subscription plans? In exchange for continuing to fork over their monthly fee, members get some nicer benefits—they can listen to an entire song before buying, for example. Non-members can, as usual, listen to a 30-second preview, though they also get 25 free full song plays every month. Most songs will go for $0.99 and albums for $9.99—Rhapsody also claims they’re “bringing back the album”—was the album really gone?—and songs are encoded as 256 kbps.

Rhapsody’s deal with Verizon allows subscribers of the mobile service to purchase and download music over the air to their handset—for a slightly pricey $1.99, admittedly—but they get not only the copy on the their phone, but a DRM-free version is downloaded to their computer as well.

Despite all of this, Apple’s not exactly quaking in their boots. Even with the rise of DRM-free music, iTunes still maintains an uncontested stranglehold on the market, due primarily to the ease of use, superior interface, and seamless integration between software and hardware. It’s going to take more than just a change to DRM-free music to get these other services to make up the market share they’ve lost in the last five years.

[via Macworld]


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