Salocin

Rhapsody : No More Kazaa?

I have subscribed to Rhapsody (listen.com), and it's better than you'd think. A replacement to Kazaa? It's becoming difficult to justify sidestepping copyright law when you can have most of the English-speaking music in the world for $10 per month.

Listen.com's Rhapsody service is a Windows-Media-Player-like application that sits on your PC and gives you instant access to a huge library of music.

While phrases like "celestial jukebox" are clearly emotionally and rhetorically loaded marketing attempts, the system doesn't fail to impress. The response speed is good - especially for the newer tracks - and the colleaction appears, at first blush, reasonably complete.

Aside from the extremely obvious recent releases (Heaven, by Live, for example), you can also get some of the music that was conspicuous in it's absent from previous online paid music offerings, such as Ben Folds or the Barenaked Ladies - hardly underground music, but previously, shamefully unavailable. Rhapsody has all that.

In terms of foreign music, I think it needs to be known in the US to have a hope of being on the system, which for an international like myself is extremely frustrating - France Gall (old, famous French music) or Kyo (recent, top-10 French music) demonstrate that at both ends of the spectrum, foreign artists are not at all represented. Should this prevent me from subscribing to it? No, but it will damage the system's ability to convince people that they can now delete Kazaa from their PCs. To those who place their ethical and legal boundaries farther out than others, it will be their excuse for saying that the service still isn't good enough.

What problems have I had with the system? Not many - I found that if I try to listen to older songs that may not be so regularly demanded, I can get a song that skips the first couple of times I play it (until it's in the Rhapsody cache). This happens even with extremely famous songs, such as Prince's When Doves Cry, although given the amount of applications simultaneously attempting to use the internet connection on my XP computer, there's a small, outside chance that this is caused by my own bandwidth issues. With DSL, I hope not.

Bottom line: Rhapsody's great, stop stealing music, it's no longer justifiable with the arguments being used (although I never thought those arguments made it justifiable in the first place). All those who said "the music industry must adapt", it has, and it's good. No more bitching.