So I went to see Death Cab For Cutie on Saturday night. As I stood at the show guzzling gin and tonics it dawned on me how valuable Rhapsody has become in my music listening, buying, concert going life.

I’m a total music junkie. That being said the subscription model was never very attractive to me and I didn’t even have a reason for why it wasn’t attractive. I’ve used the Real Player for years but only started seriously using and subscribing to Rhapsody back in the spring of this year.

I’m an avid iTunes user, I’ve subscribed to Launch for about 4 years now and I’ve had XM in my car for a few years now. As a music junkie the one thing in the messaging of Rhapsody that was never effectively communicated to me personally was how Rhapsody could really enhance my music experience beyond the obvious which I think was one of the main reasons that I had trouble absorbing how valuable Rhapsody could be and why.

So flashback to this past Saturday night at the Death Cab show I started thinking about how Rhapsody has changed if not revolutionized how I consumer music, how I attend concerts and how I purchase albums.

Here’s the scenario:
1) About a month ago I see Death Cab is coming to Denver so I purchased tickets via Ticketmaster
2) On the confirmation email upon purchase I see that a band called Youth Group is opening the show
3) I open Rhapsody up and download Youth Group’s latest album to see how it is
4) Tickets arrive in the mail with a Netflix Free Trial offer as part of the mail package
5) The Youth Group album is listenable but probably not something I would end up buying
6) The Youth Group album is however good enough that I’m intrigued to see how they sound live and to see if their live show is enough to make me spend more time with the album via Rhapsody or to purchase the disc
7) I got to the show early in order to let Youth Group solidify my opinion on them one way or the other
Youth Group was great live and I will be spending much more time with their album now that I have different perspective on their sound

Conclusion….Because of using Rhapsody I was able to a) make the right decision about what time to get to the show b) will probably end up purchasing the Youth Group album to have for my music collection.

It seems that the strategy for Real/Rhapsody is probably more along the lines of moving most/all consumers to a pure subscription based model in hopes that the Rhapsody compatible devices continue to get adopted by more and more consumers but in the interim it does feel like there is probably a significant slice of consumers that could/would/and do use Rhapsody as a “testing” service to Hear Everything & Buy Smart. Considering the obstacles and competition that come from Yahoo! Music, iTunes, etc., etc. this messaging/concept might be an interesting “side road” for some of the Rhapsody marketing efforts to consider.