Mark Collier

Disclosure: I work for Yahoo! and was involved in negotiating the deal between the two companies to bring Rhapsody services to Yahoo! users.

Rhapsody has joined the MP3 store ranks with a new offering, and are kicking it off by giving anyone who opens an account a “free album” a.k.a. $10 in free music. The catch is that you have to redeem the offer by July 4th, so if you want to try it out and get your free music on (legally), you’ve only got a few days.

My experience in navigating their site and selecting an album was pretty straightforward. I decided to get the new Weezer album which has that youtube star video everyone is riled up about (approaching 9M views!). Yahoo! just shot a really cool live sets, hootenanny style which should be live soon. If you want to buy the record, be sure to get the one with the bonus tracks (same price).

After setting up the account (really fast process) and picking the album, things stopped going so smoothly. I didn’t have their download manager yet, so I downloaded it. Unfortunately, after downloading it, the install didn’t kick off so I had to search in my download folder and start the install. Then, after installing it, the Weezer album didn’t start downloading – just an email from Rhapsody thanking me for the purchase.

So I went back to the site, which had a blurb reminding me I hadn’t downloaded some songs I recently purchased (a plus)… OK, lay it on me… Well that didn’t kick off the download either, even though the DL manager was open! So If finally opted for the Zip file download of the songs and manually added them to My Music & iTunes. Ugh. I’m not sure if the bug is peculiar to my setup (firefox / winxp – pretty common) but hopefully our friends at Rhapsody will get the kinks worked out to catch up with the excellent Amazon process.

One thing’s for sure: it’s good to see more (legal) choice in the DRM-free music world, but the convenience has to be there. The other thing sorely lacking from a “store” experience is context. I’m happy to see Rhapsody partnering with companies like iLike (and, of course, Yahoo!) to put full length track playback and DRM-free purchases in the more natural context of your friend’s musical tastes, artist alerts etc. A digital store is, after all, an attempt to replicate a physical record store and how exactly is that business doing? Sort of like a web “page” is borrowing (a bit too much) from print, but that’s for another blog post.

Also, be sure to check out Michael “spiegs” spieglman raising a glass with Rob Glaser and Death Cab in NYC.

Has anyone else tried the process? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Mark