Rhapsody.com was on the no-fly list until recently: they were every kind of wrong for Phree Musique: subscription, DRM format only, tied to the hated Real Player - but I’d read they had recently joined the growing ranks of those tapped to skunk iTunes yet again with a la carte, major label MP3 downloads on sale for more or less the going rate. Even so, I probably would have let my ongoing spite for Real keep them on the bottom of the check-out list, except for one thing: when I’d gone by to casually cruise the interface I’d noted they were giving a good deal on Led Zeppelin: Complete.
Zeppelin being one of my format problem bands: this set is mostly selections from my (recently-released-to-secondary-retail) tape collection, but Zep along with a handful of others I still own on that most persistent of formats, vinyl. I did some experiments transferring LPs to digital which were conclusive: it was a pain in the ass.
Other thirty-something’s Led Zeppelin nostalgia couldn’t be duller, right? So suffice to say that it is music that has earned a permanent spot on my emotional playlist and provided the soundtrack on a fair cross-section of teenage angst and joy. I figured I’d buy it again someday.
Still, I dithered over the purchase. I’ve yet to pay this much for a single purely digital item. The Box Set: the usual deal is you save on volume, but the physical package generally sweetens the deal with bonus material: booklets, photos, packaging, lyrics. My experience with the digital music market suggested that I’d get bupkus but the song files out of this deal. I’m not a fanatic: the bonus audio, the live versions and rare studio out takes didn’t hold much appeal.
Still, the deal was solid: the same package on Amazon was almost 40 dollars more. Maybe I’d be better off cherry picking the main albums? No help there: I wanted pretty much the canon: I through IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, and yes, Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda, and the live stuff off of The Song Remains the Same at least. Over a hundred dollars worth of even the cheapest digital downloads, more than even the Complete Set download at Amazon. It’s a good deal. Really, when was the last time I read any of the printed material from a CD (there’s that slippery slope into digital ephemera again)?
I went for it. Browsing and building a shopping cart on Rhapsody can be done without a sign in, checkout requires setting up an account. Oops, it turns out I already signed up at some point back: looks like I’ve been resisting this purchase longer than I realized. Sign in, a standard credit card checkout, download initiated. A straight zip download: the lack of a proprietary download tool is a welcome feature.
I’ve been observing with interest the fact that digital music comes with a maintenance cost that CDs lack for being their own physical archive: I download, start loading it up into my iTunes library, but then burn the zip file to DVD: protect the data. All is ephemeral but you do what you can. And then, If I want to listen to it in the car I need to burn CDs. The blank discs, of course, are on my tab. Media and time: one is cheap but the other is ever more dear. But it takes me more than a minute to work off 60 bucks so I do my diligence and back up.
Rhapsody almost got shrugs teetering on the edge of props, because one nice deal doesn’t overcome that same old same old two point oh dietetic candy lozenge graphic design that makes browsing at their store a big ol’ yawn, the same old computer-generated link puke front page, the same boring categories, flavor of the month favorites, and blah blah blah you just paid 60 smacks for seventeen cents worth of bandwidth. And intellectual property, of course, which with luck and a little management I could own forever...
But in a little postmortem browsing later I discovered that on a fair cross-section of their material (not including Led Zeppelin, which is why I missed the feature the first time, and defined, one presumes, by the dictates of the content owners) Rhapsody is providing free, full preview without being signed in - in other words, you can just browse right in and stream full songs while you shop (albeit in an annoying pop-up window). Free listening, once an absolute staple of the record store experience just makes sense and its general absence in the current digital retail sphere is basically absurd. You nudged yourself into props, Rhapsody... just barely, so don’t get too comfortable.
P. S., why yes, they did indeed include metacontent with my “Complete” Led Zeppelin, in the form of one (1) jpeg of the collection’s utterly dull cover (the ZOSO symbols white on a black field), of the grainy persuasion, matchbook sized for mobile display. Probably could have included a 40 page pdf that someone probably already has lying around for about two tenths of a cent but grumble grumble grumble.
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