MTV/Viacom announced today that The Beatles have agreed to let their music be used for the video game Rock Band. This is great news as up until now they have signed NO digital music deals. No iTunes, no Rhapsody, no Napster, no nothing. You can hear The Beatles in radio formats (including on the Rhapsody Channels), but not purchase or streaming. Hopefully this is the beginning of an experiment that will let the music of The Beattles be available everywhere.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly considering entering into the digital music business and becoming a streaming competitor to iTunes and MySpace.

Zuckerberg is in talks with several song streaming services and music community sites including Rhapsody.com, iMeem.com, iLike.com, and Lala.com, sources familiar with the situation said, according to the New York Post.
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Ipsos, a global market research company, says that Apple Inc.’s iTunes, No. 7 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, still is the alpha dog in the world of fee-based digital music. But Amazon.com Music (No. 1) and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody (No. 89) brands are making inroads.

The fifth annual TEMPO Digital Music Brandscape study, conducted by Ipsos, shows that awareness and use were steady among the most dominant brands this year, but did increase for three top competitors while declining among many lesser-known players. For example, iTunes continued to grow in terms of awareness, usage, familiarity and “best brand” mentions in the study. But Amazon had a strong first year, with initial awareness, usage, favorability and “best brand” ratings comparable to any of the top brands after iTunes. And Amazon matched iTunes in user satisfaction.
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Check it out - Rhapsody has Kid Rock’s entire catalog as an exclusive - no one else has the Kid including iTunes. Here’s a list of the albums you can listen to for free and buy in DRM free MP3 format. You can listen to Explicit or Edited versions of each - Sweet!
- Rock n Roll Jesus
- ‘Live’ Trucker
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I love Rick Rubin. I think he is one of the great music producers of our time and one of the most versatile guys in the business. The fact that he resurrected Johnny Cash’s career in his twilight with some extremely powerful music puts him high on my personal list. I was reading an article in the New York Times about his role at Columbia Music and a section caught my attention as he was describing the future of music. This is Rhapsody’s model and why I continue to believe that as the internet becomes more pervasive, the subscription model will be important.

“Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. “You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You’ll say, ‘Today I want to listen to … Simon and Garfunkel,’ and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now.”
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I just read an article on CNN Money about Napster (read it here) and it got me thinking about the future of Napster and the impact on the subscription music industry. I’ve been a fan of Rhapsody for a long time (obvious if you read this site) and have always thought that the music subscription model is superior to the iTunes/MP3 store model. With the introduction of DRM free MP3s in Rhapsody, I’m even more convinced of it - especially for someone who is online all of the time like I am. Rhapsody makes listening to whatever I want, whenever I want, as much as I want really easy.

Napster is the same subscription model and with their new player version, looks A LOT like Rhapsody (go figure). However, according to this article, their subscription numbers are flat, they are losing money hand over fist and don’t have a strong marketing partnership like the MTV Networks with Rhapsody. In addition, Rhapsody has taken over the Urge service AND Yahoo Music Service. Rhapsody is growing while Napster is not. So, what happens to Napster? They have cash in the back and a really low stock price - great acquisition candidate by someone - Apple? Amazon? RealNetworks? Are we better off with two major subscription services or is the market not big enough?
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It was bound to happen, but Rhapsody finally launched a DRM Free MP3 store and integrating the DRM Free MP3s into the Rhapsody Jukebox. So, what does this mean?
- If you have a Rhapsody membership (subscription) you can listen to full songs as much as you want and buy songs for $.99 that work on any MP3 player including iPods.
- If you don’t have a Rhapsody membership, you can still listen to up to 25 song streams per month and buy DRM free songs for $.99 or $9.99 for the album.
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The British Alt band Radiohead has finally released their catalog to Rhapsody for streaming and downloading. This is great news for Radiohead fans and Rhapsody subscribers as now you can explore their entire catalog and listen to any complete song as much as you want if you are a Rhapsody subscriber. I’ve heard a few Radiohead songs on the radio, but never been a true devotee’. I just listened to their greatest hits “The Best Of” and found quite a few that I really enjoy such as “Just”, “High and Dry” and “Lucky”.

Here is a complete list of albums from Radiohead on Rhapsody. Each Radiohead album has a review from a Rhapsody Editor. Try finding THAT on Napster or iTunes.
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Some would say that playing music and being an indie is a non-profit endeavor in and of itself, but trying to create a social consciousness platform on music - sounds dicey. Global Music Project is giving it a go by donating the proceeds of downloaded/purchased music to music preservation programs that will record and archive endangered music traditions from around the world. Global Music Project is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit so donations are tax deductible. So, visit www.globalmusicproject.org, listen to contributed music and save music with a download purchase.

Rhapsody and Virgin are running a promotion that gives you a 30 day free trial of Rhapsody to Go (vs the standard 14 day free trial). You are forced to watch the Virgin Mobile video commercial merchandising the Flare from LG. It’s short and painless

Click here to see the promotion.