With a music collection of 72,000 albums comes a dilemma: which ones do you play—today, tomorrow, and the next day? This is the dilemma of the Rhapsody subscriber, or for that matter the subscriber to any large online jukebox service. With a huge library of music at your disposal (and paid for) you are free to try more music, to range further, and pursue whims you just couldn't before. Yet all too often we stick with what we know, our old safe favorites, and miss out on great music in the process. What we need are tools to help us explore the catalog: reviews, best-of lists, charts, and recommendations. Enter the latest tool: the blog, or in this case, the Rhapsody blog, which takes advantage of the fact that there are a lot of other people (600,000+) who have access to that same collection of 72,000 albums, some of whom are eager to share their discoveries.
Like other music blogs, these Web pages have brief commentary and links to music online, only here they're not just linking to the occasional MP3 file on a Web site, but to entire albums and playlists that can be streamed from Rhapsody's catalog of 900,000 tracks. By clicking on a link (URL), you load the playlist into your Rhapsody player where it can be played, provided your subscription is active. If you like the playlist, you can save it to your Rhapsody playlist library for future use, send it to a friend via e-mail, or post it to your own blog (if you have one). Web links can be created for tracks, albums, playlists, and even Rhapsody's radio stations.
These Rhapsody blogs include the Rhapsody Radish, the Rhapsody Rock School, and the JamBase Rhapsody Blog among others. This week on the "Radish" you could find a Martin Luther King tribute playlist, a playlist containing covers of classic Disney songs, and a playlist containing songs which use the Talkbox voice synthesizer (think Peter Frampton). On the Rhapsody Rock School site, you could find a playlist created in appreciation of singer/guitarist Mary Lou Lord and a playlist featuring artists scheduled to play at the upcoming South by Southwest music festival. Frank Zappa fans got the happy news on the JamBase Rhapsody Blog that 52 Zappa albums had just been added to Rhapsody. Had they relied solely on the Rhapsody player, this news might have passed them by.
Of these sites, the Rhapsody Radish site has the most playlists, archiving them in wide array of categories. For links to other Rhapsody blogs, go to the Rhapsody Rock School. Collectively, these sites provide Rhapsody subscribers a much needed dose of community, one that will hopefully grow into something bigger.
For a long time, I have wondered why Rhapsody hasn't provided a Web site to facilitate the sharing and archival of Rhapsody playlists. As it stands now, Rhapsody's editors post a playlist, only for it to disappear a few days later. If you don't save the playlist during this brief window of opportunity, you're unlikely to ever see it again. Until now, that is, because a blogger has begun performing this helpful archival function for them. Thank you Plastic Boy!
As I see it, these blogs perform the following useful functions: they alert me to new and interesting additions to the catalog; they show me interesting slices of the catalog that I would not have thought (or had time) to create; and they provide me with labor-of-love playlists created by true enthusiasts. Prior to the emergence of these blogs, I was limited to getting Rhapsody playlists from subscribers that I knew. Now that I can tap into the knowledge of the broader Rhapsody community, my subscription has become more valuable.
—Andy Breeding
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