Rhapsody went DRM-free on Monday and announced partnerships with iLike and Yahoo, in addition to revealing what it was doing with its partners of nine months, Viacom's MTV Networks and Verizon. Real software engineer Rob Williams said the company has been working on the technical underpinnings of this strategy for about three years.
Starting with iLike, Rhapsody's partners will soon roll out an embedded version of its five-million-song catalog on their sites, allowing users to listen to up to 25 full length songs for free every month. The exception is Verizon, which will allow Rhapsody subscribers to access the catalog over the air on their phones, as well as purchasing $2 songs that are delivered immediately to the phone but also to the user's computer in the MP3 format.
We posted about this Monday morning and attended the associated launch party that night, featuring a performance by Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard (pictured here performing at the event).
New details emerged during the press conference portion of the evening. Yahoo senior music director Michael Spiegelman said that its embrace of Rhapsody's MP3 store was set in motion by Ian Rogers, who had set the company in motion away from DRM before leaving to form TopSpin. He also mentioned that Yahoo averages around 20 million unique visitors each month to its music properties.
ILike CEO Ali Partovi said that with 28 million users, iLike is thedominant music application on the Facebook, Hi5 and Orkut socialnetworks. His take on music subscriptions is that people love them oncethey try them, but that many never bother trying them out. Hesaid embedding Rhapsody on iLike will expose it to a new group ofusers, and that it constituted the first scalable musicconsumption application for social networks.
Rob Glaser, Rhapsody's CEO, who emceed the event, pointed out that it'sbeen nine months since Rhapsody partnered with MTV and Verizon, andthat Monday's announcement represented the culmination of a lot of workdone over that period to figure out how to connect Rhapsody's back endservice to its partners' front ends.
John Harrobin, Verizon's senior vice president of digital media andmarketing, pointed out a nice Rhapsody for subscribers: if it findsDRMed songs purchased from iTunes while scanning your PC for music,
it'll automatically download subscription versions of those songs soyou don't need to redownload them (I proposed a similar feature earlier this year). He said that he was able to set up his new Rhapsody account and sync it across six devices (three PCs, a Windows DRM-capable MP3 player and two cellphones) in about an hour.
Harrobin also mentioned that currently, 90 percent of the music purchased on Verizon's VCast music store have been over-the-air downloads that go directly to the phone, and that consumers hadn't been using it much to buy music for listening on their PCs. He hopes users will embrace that feature now that they'll be getting DRM-free MP3s from Rhapsody with each purchase.
Then it was time for Ben Gibbard's full-length acoustic set, which kept the audience mostly enthralled:
Rhapsody's bartenders served up two theme drinks: the Rhapso-tini andthe MP3-ini. Here, Nick Stumpf and Josh Wise of the French Kicks (whoshare a manager with Gibbard) enjoy the latter after talking digital music with Listening Post:
Ted Danson was there, apparently (pictured here looking dead serious with two of the "music without limits" girls):
Rhapsody CEO Rob Glaser was master of ceremonies during the press conference portion of the evening:
From left to right, here's Michael Spiegelman of Yahoo, Rob Glaser of Real, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, Ali Partovi of iLike and Courtney Holt of MTV:
There was a decent turnout for the event, held at New York's Hiro Ballroom:
See Also:
- Rhapsody Goes DRM Free and Unveils Partnerships
- Rhapsody And Tivo Join Forces
- MOG Integrates Rhapsody For Full Track Playback
- Napster Launches DRM-Free Music Store: Over 6 Million MP3s
- Early Review: Amazon's New MP3 Music Store
French Kicks photo: Eliot Van Buskirk; all other photos by Shelby Chan, courtesy of Rhapsody.
