Burn A Song For 99 Cents

tusixoh writes "CNN is running an article about an online music company, Listen.com, who has signed deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group allowing users to burn songs from both companies' catalogs (more than 75,000 available tracks) on Listen's Rhapsody music subscription service for 99 cents per track. Until now, Rhapsody had primarily offered only streamed music to subscribers from all of the world's largest record labels as well as several independent labels." The upside of this, of course, is that it won't be necessary to pay for songs that are just "album filler".

Comments

Windows only, 10 songs/month only

[cweber]

I have two problems with this new service:
Their client, Rhapsody, is Windows only, and you can only burn
10 songs per month. Nice try, but lame.

Re:Neat.

[Camulus]

Actually, there is something that pretty much does. eMusic has a massive list of music you can grab. They don't have all of the major artists on tap, but they have a lot of good music there from small/indie artists. 10$ or 15$ a month for unlimited completely legal mp3's (and no I don't work for them, just happy with the service). I have been using it for about 2 months now and it has worked great for me. I have downloaded around 10 gigs of mp3's so far and have listened to a lot of music I doubt I would have heard otherwise.

EMusic has done this for years

[linuxbaby]

EMusic, for that same price, lets you download fully unlocked standard MP3 files.

$9.95 a month gets you unlimited downloads - not an additional 99 cents per song. You can burn 'em and do anything you want with 'em.

Emusic a very underrated site, now that their big-advertising VC stuff has gone. Really wonderful. (NO I'm not affiliated.)

Burn? Not exactly.

[Eric Seppanen]

The article title "Burn A Song For 99 Cents" is misleading. They're offering the same crap we've seen before; encrypted DRM-laden tracks that you can't use anywhere but your machine, without their approval. Check out their FAQ:

9. Can I burn CDs?
Yes. If you subscribe to any catalog that offers CD burning, you can burn up to 10 tracks a month.

10 tracks per month? That's not even one whole CD! Give me a break. And it's pretty obvious that not all of their "catalogs" will allow burning. This is a perversion of fair use: "oh, you want to take it with you? Well, that'll cost you another $___".

I will never pay a single dime for crippled formats.

10 song per month CD burning limit

[systemapex]

Read the FAQs. This is horrible. You can't even burn one average-sized album onto a CD. Not to mention the proprietary CD burning component isn't available yet.

Re:Burn? Not exactly.

[bmarklein]

Wrong!

There's no information on Listen's site about Rhapsody 2.0, which will feature burning. The FAQ you list applies to their current service, specifically the Naxos Classical subscription.

The new service will have no DRM, and you will be able to buy as many tracks as you want at 99 cents each. The interesting thing is that they are going to stream PCM audio directly to the burner. So, DRM won't be the issue, buffer underruns will be when their streaming servers can't keep up with your CD player!

Let's clear up some misconceptions

[maleficentgruel]

Hey guys, I work for Listen.com and am the main technical producer of Rhapsody. It's great to see such heated discussion and there are a lot of great points here. However, I gotta point out some misconceptions:

1) the FAQ is OLD. We're launching on Monday with what we call "a la carte" CD burning. This means you can burn as many CDs as you want. No monthly restrictions, no restrictions at all.

2) The audio format on the CD is regular redbook audio. No DRMs, no restrictions. They're yours after you pay the $.99

3) If you want to check out Rhapsody without paying, just register and download it if you want to see the artist list. You can listen to 30 second clips and a selection of radio stations without paying us.

(remember that this is not released yet. wait 'til next week. ok, back to QA...gotta burn me some CDs ;)