Talk:Rhapsody (online music service)

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1 Giant ad for Rhapsody
2 Needs rewrite
3 Songs Diminishing
4 POV addressed?
5 Long Tail

[edit] Giant ad for Rhapsody

Is this article even encyclopedia worthy? c'mon, let's get it right between what is useful knowledge and what is fluff. 24.60.253.36 04:30, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Neutral POV issue: it's up to the reader to decide what's "good" and what's "undesirable".

Someone could probably just change them to "Features" vs "Criticisms" and all would be fancy. Gamiar 08:45, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually if it has to do with Rhapsody at all it should be kept, I've fixed it to represent the rhapsody I know.. I know the Mac users are fumed at Rhapsody because Real does not distribute a Mac version of Rhapsody, the problem may not be Real's so much.. Apple prevented Rhapsody from infiltrating on the glorified iPod domain by preventing iPod's new frimware from playing rhapsody's DRM.. Note, companies use firmware upgrades like this to control the market of the player, limiting consumers to few selections, its why Apple is so successful in cornering the itunes stuff.. But I'll drop the bomb on this parade, the music files are no better than the original CD's and if you encode from CD's the sound quality is infinitely better than any song you download from Apple's service or any music service for that matter.. And If youa re listening to a Elvis Costello CD, you may pay about 24 dollars for a CD downloaded from iTunes because Elvis Costello's CD's tend to have like 16 songs with about 8 acoustic versions and such.. Don't be suprised if musicians start making many short songs for sale on iTunes or Rhapsody.. I personally only use Rhapsody to listen to music online, I don't use it with my mp3 player.. If you like to listen to music this way, this is right for you, if not, what can I say.. PS- iPod uses a little hard_disk, and hard disk's crash, if you hard disk crashes, apple will not replace it.. That's why I don't own one.. So Apple makes money on its market's ignorance.. --Rofthorax 08:01, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

FYI, current versions of rhapsody are iPod-compatible again. --Peter Farago 02:31, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

You can't buy albums from RealRhapsody - except to burn them to CD. I believe the author is confusing RealRhapsody and the Real online music store - the Harmony section should be deleted

The latest version of Rhapsody (3.0) lets you buy tracks and merges in the Harmony functionality - RobLa 04:09, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

I think the part about this being only available in the US and that it has DRM, is not worth mentioning since all you need is a credit card to purchase Rhapsody service, and you can burn songs to CD.

[edit] Needs rewrite

This article is a giant list of bullet points. It needs to be rewritten into a proper article. There are also some POV issues, I renamed the sections on "good features" and "bad features". Rhobite 21:27, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Real Rhapsody and audiogalaxy's rhapsody, I see a potential conflict or lawsuit.

Are they the same, or are they different? I know they are different, but it's puzzling that no one has said anything about this anywhere on the net.

The are the same service, just distributed by two different companies. It is one of the businesses that Listen (the creators of Rhapsody) explored.

[edit] Songs Diminishing

I'm a little bit angry at Rhapsody/Real because of their diminishing amount of music available. I signed up for a 3-month subscription, and so far I've been rewarded with increasingly less music to play. When I signed up you could listen to all sorts of stuff, including "major" artists, and just add it to the playlist and you were golden. Now I'm having to turn to p2p services and get my music that way (which is not the way I wanted to play it, and rhapsody in some instances doesn't even offer the music up for buying, even though I probably wouldn't buy it, that would be too expensive). It seems pretty annoying to me that I pay for music and then they actually remove content (I've seen this in several cases, such as my playlists suddenly being filled with 30-second spots). Just a rant :)

-YuriASF

The music licensing issue is not entirely the fault of Rhapsody. Music licensing agreements with these music services are done with major record labels who set agreed pricing for albums, and in many cases, individual tracks within them. Some tracks are licensed to Rhapsody at a promotional rate which expires, meaning that the service will carry those tracks on their Unlimited service for a limited time. Other albums are licensed for Unlimited play based on their tracks, and you'll discover one or two that are purchase only. Others are not available at all in any digital form. It is not true that Rhapsody is actually reducing the number of tracks in their catalog - they are increasing over time. It's just that you may perceive a reduction based on albums you were already familiar with being available now converted into purchase-only or no longer available status.

Part of this is the fault of the labels who are trying to extract as much money as possible to license their libraries, and the other is the fault of Rhapsody who obviously sets a maximum tolerable price they will consider to include a track in their "unlimited plan." This is true of every music service, however. MusicNet, which provides the libraries for most of the other music services using Windows Media format, offers clients a library ranging from just under one million tracks to well over three million (and at varying bitrates). It's up to the music service itself to decide what level of service they wish to subscribe, and offer customers.

-Phillip

[edit] POV addressed?

I just stumbled upon this article, and it looks relatively NPOV to me, yet the NPOV warning is still displayed. Has this been addressed, or am I missing something? I'll wait a few days before removing it. --Rehcsif 19:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The limitations and success sections sound rather negative to me. I don't think the POV has been fixed. --24.4.254.87 06:37, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I second this looks just fine to me .