joegratz.net

I’ve been a happy Rhapsody subscriber for several years now. But some recent deletions from their catalog have made me wonder about the long-term viability of subscription music services.

I pay $10 a month for all the music I want. This is great. New releases usually show up on Rhapsody the day they come out. They have the bulk of major label catalog releases, too. When a great new CD comes out, as you may know from my musicblog at right, I tend to listen to it obsessively and really get attached to it.

Several times over the past few months, new releases have appeared on Rhapsody on their release date, only to be pulled from the catalog a few weeks or months later. Some examples I’ve noticed include the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell and Belle and Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Other albums I used to listen to a lot that were later pulled include Sondre Lerche’s Faces Down, Jennifer Kimball’s Veering From The Wave, and Chicane’s Behind the Sun.

So, now I have to buy the CDs. There is the possibility here for some very nasty crack-dealer-like licensing behavior on the part of the record companies: they license to subscription services for a while, then pull the album so people who are hooked go out and buy the CDs. Record companies could even repeat this gambit over and over, hooking new subscription-service users then forcing CD purchases each time.

Is that what happened with the albums I listed above? I don’t know. But the possibility that a favorite album could be suddenly unavailable one day on the subscription services greatly reduces their utility.

One thing’s for sure: when I was running Andromeda against 20 GB of MP3s in college (one statute of limitations ago), nothing disappeared from my catalog. I don’t want to have to go back to that.

UPDATE: Matt Graves of Real has responded to this post; his comments are here.