Rhapsody: An Apology Of Sorts
Last week I wrote an annoyed post on the demise of one of my favorite music web services, Yottamusic.
I let Rhapsody have it for shutting down Yotta, which was an alternative web client for subscribers of Rhapsody. Here’s what I said:
Rhapsody should be like dial tone. You subscribe to it and use it wherever you want
The fact that they’ve shut down yotta shows that they are old school luddites without a clue.
Screw them. I am so off of Rhapsody as soon as someone like spotify comes along with the right model.
Ben Rotholtz, who is GM Web Services & Syndication at Rhapsody, left several well written comments to the post and he and I have been trying to schedule some time to talk which hasn’t happened due to my vacation and his trip to CES.
The story here is that Rhapsody’s API is governed by the terms of their content licenses with the record labels. Yottamusic was doing some things outside of their API and outside of their terms of service in order to fully replicate the Rhapsody experience for their users. Rhapsody had no choice to shut them down or be in violation of its deals with the labels.
So I guess I owe Rhapsody an apology here. It’s not entirely their fault. They are not luddites. They are in bed with luddites.
As one of my mentors in the venture business used to say all the time – "when you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas."
Comments (Archived):
nice.
Hey Fred, one of the services that Ben mentioned in his comments is MOG. Just wondering if you’ve had a chance to check it out yet. I’ve set up a profile there and had a look around but I’ll need to spend some time with it before I can make a fair comparison to YottaMusic.
I tried MOG and there is nothing special that I found in it. It didn’t help efficiently discover new music Ala Pandora nor gave a great intergration with Rhapsody. maybe I was using it wrong, I don’t know.
It really sucks that media services come in three flavors:1. Blessed by the king maker — media companies bless a service and dictate control over it2. UGC — users contribute content and anything goes, however, a lot of good stuff gets removed for copyright violations3. Piracy — anything goes but the producer/artist gets screwedIn today’s market users have the upper hand because they control the scarcity: User Attention. From this seat of power users demand interactivity and control. It’s shameful that only piracy serves these demands. Let’s give users what they want and learn to monetize all the exhaust surrounding media consumption.As for MOG, I use it mostly for music discovery from neighbors (ala last.fm). They do have a rather thorough scrobbling tool.
It really sucks that media services come in three flavors:1. Blessed by the king maker — media companies bless a service and dictate control over it2. UGC — users contribute content and anything goes, however, a lot of good stuff gets removed for copyright violations3. Piracy — anything goes but the producer/artist gets screwedIn today’s market users have the upper hand because they control the scarcity: User Attention. From this seat of power users demand interactivity and control. It’s shameful that only piracy serves these demands. Let’s give users what they want and learn to monetize all the exhaust surrounding media consumption.As for MOG, I use it mostly for music discovery from neighbors (ala last.fm). They do have a rather thorough scrobbling tool.
That is the same issue with the new movie set top boxes. I think Vudu is out to make a great product but they are still at the mercy of the movie studios just as Rhapsody is limited on what the studios allow them to do to access their library.