As of today, you no longer have to use the Rhapsody application to purchase music from the company, and all of the single song downloads in its store are available as unprotected MP3s. Rhapsody's offering differs from that of Amazon MP3 because prospective buyers can preview full tracks – up to 25 of them per month – before deciding whether or not to purchase them on Rhapsody or one of its partner sites. The new service will roll out to Rhapsody's new partners as well, iLike, MTV Networks and Yahoo.
"Over the last year or so, obviously the major labels have become more comfortable moving to MP3 formats for purchases, which opens a lot of doors for us with respect to going after a larger audience and making a better customer service experience available to people," Rhapsody vice president Neil Smith told Listening Post. "We have the opportunity to work on every basic digital music device that's ever been put out, including all the 'i' devices from Apple, so that's a big opportunity for us."
In addition to making all five million-plus songs in its subscription service available as individual MP3 downloads on its own site, Rhapsody has partnered with iLike, MTV Networks and Yahoo to let their users listen to 25 free on-demand songs per month, subscribe to Rhapsody or purchase an MP3 of the song they just previewed. (Other stores don't allow full track previews.) As with Amazon MP3, a download helper application imports purchased MP3s directly into iTunes for easy syncing to iPods, iPhones and other MP3 players.
Of the three, the iLike partnership is particularly significant because it extendsRhapsody onto Facebook and other social networks, giving iLike users (including those who only use it via Facebook) access 25 full length Rhapsody songs per month and the opportunity to buy MP3s wherever they happen to hear the songs. All songs cost 99 cents each, and most albums are available for $10 each.
"We're really, really excited to be a part of this deal," iLike CEO Ali Partovi told Listening Post. "The impact for us and for the 28 million consumers that we reach across Facebook and other social networks is essentially upgrading the music across iLike from 30 second samples to free, full-song playback. The other impact is that, essentially, for artists and labels, they'll be paid royalties every time their music is played across iLike, making this the first widespread implementation of a scalable model to monetize music consumption across not only iLike but Facebook and the other social networks that we syndicate on."
Users will not be required to sign in to the services in order to access the 25 songs per month. A "Flash cookie" tracks listening behavior and shuts off the preview function for the rest of the month once you've hit the 25-song limit across all of the services. (At this point, the 25 preview limit also applies to Rhapsody subscribers.)
Rhapsody has also partnered with Verizon VCast, whose Rhapsody subscribers ($15/month) can purchase music for $2 per track and have it delivered over-the-air to their cellphones, with an additional copy downloadable to their PCs in the MP3 format.
The MP3s in Rhapsody's new web-based store are encoded at 256 Kbps bit rate, and were not transcoded from Rhapsody's previous format, WMA, according to Smith. Instead, the labels re-delivered them in the new format. As with Amazon's MP3 store, the music from Universal Music Group contains a watermark which appears harmless (it only indicates the name of the store from which it was purchased, and contains no information that could identify a user).
In order to promote the store, Rhapsody is giving an MP3 album to everyone who registers (for free) before July 4. The company also intends on publicizing the deal by spending around $50 million on marketing next year.
Of course, imeem offers free, on-demand playback of much of the same music. When asked whether Rhapsody was considering a free, ad-supported option, Smith said "We look at a lot of things, and there's nothing to announce at this time." However, he did confirm that Rhapsody will add a feature that lets blogs and other sites embed full songs from Rhapsody, similar to imeem's offering. As long as a particular user hasn't reached the 25-song limit, they'll be able to listen to the song in full via Rhapsody 25, whereas some of imeem's songs are only embeddable in 30-second samples.
According to Smith, Rhapsody's embrace of DRM-free MP3 downloads and free on-demand playback of 25 songs per month does not mean its abandoning music subscriptions, which in Listening Post's opinion is probably one of the only places where DRM makes sense. "We don't view this in any way as moving away from the subscription business, we think that's a very valuable consumer proposition. That said, there's an audience of people for whom that's not going to be an appealing product, and we want to offer something to them. In addition, there's a lot of confusion around what it is, and the value proposition. We're kind of in the same position TiVo was several years ago, when nobody really understood what it was, but the people who tried it and used it would give you their right arm before they'd give you their TiVo. We expect that the more people we can get to experience the freedom of digital music, the more people will eventually get the value proposition of subscription and move into it."
Rhapsody's MP3 store is online.
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