"Tonight I went to a dinner party at some friend's house, and in between the cold dry sake and an obscene amount of yellow tail and hamachi, there was more music than we knew what to do with. These are friends that until six months ago, had been sampling all sorts of free stuff on P2P networks. Not all of it was good or complete, but they buy a lot of CD's and wanted to try stuff out first, and they wanted the convenience of mixing up thousands of songs for days of play, or a few seconds as the case may be.
Anyway, tonight, we played around with Rhapsody which was totally great and lots of fun. And my friends are proving my point that if you make it easy, cool, give decent information about the music and make it cheap, people will abandon the free stuff for something much more professional. Sorting by artist, title, genre, album, play lists we made up, we streamed Thievery Corp, Gotan and Ladytron through the first course, and then went from cool jazz, to Chopin and Mozart for the second, and then we veered into Bah-bra and Barry Gibb, the GoGo's (who can resist skidmarks on my heart!), Supertramp, Artie Shaw, Radiohead, Elton John, Frank, Ben Folds Five (Kate!), Jon Cutler, the Replacements, for about three hours of dancing, everybody was in on it, clicking and sampling. There is also stuff you can't search for or directly stream, like the Beatles, on their 'radio stations.' " [bIPlog]
Heh - it's not just me and Kailee grooving with Rhapsody. I still think the service could leapfrog to the front of the pack if it would just start offering single downloads without requiring the user to burn a full CD first and without using Windows Media Player to do it. The weird thing is that Rhapsody trusts you to burn the CD - I haven't found any invasive DRM yet, so if they'd just trust me (and the rest of their customers) with the single downloads, I'd go back to purchasing music.
