Rhapsody MP3 launched with great fanfare this week. Finally some competition for DRM-free music. Well it turns out Amazon doesn't really need this sort of craptastic competition; they're doing just fine by themselves, thank-you-very-much.As a launch promotion, Rhapsody was giving away $10 credit if you sign up for an account, so of course I did. I went through my list of favorite artists searching for gems I may have missed (like Peter Gabriel's Ovo, which I only discovered about a month ago.) And I found it: Jason Falkner doing a cover of Do Ya on a Jeff Lynne Tribute album. Sweet.
So I order it up, and click the download link. 32 tracks at 256 kbps is nearly 250MB. But no worries; I'll just leave it going in the background while I finish up some work. I flip back over to the download an hour later, and it's stuck at 72 MB. I try kicking it by pausing and resuming, but it's officially hosed. No worries, I'm heading home, so I just kill it outright. I log into my account from home, go to my downloads page, select all, and download. And I end up with 22 tracks.
That's right. I am missing the first third of my album. Rhapsody thinks that my stalled download from earlier in the day was a unmitigated success, and happily turns off my ability to get these tracks again.
So I ping support. I try to explain how my partial ZIP file is corrupt and I don't have access to the tracks, either on my computer or on their web site. They send me back inane boilerplate such as "try redownloading the ZIP file again. You should be able to do this through the My Account" and "Our policy is that you can only download the tracks once" (which I take to mean at most once. Apparently zero is OK too). I go through two exchanges with "customer support" over 2 days, and finally give up. This is "support" in name only.
I'm on my own now. I spend far too long looking for a free tool to recover files from a corrupt ZIP archive (why the heck don't all ZIP programs do this?). I am unsuccessful and as a bonus, I acquire a virus on my Windows virtual machine. Fabulous. Something else to deal with. In my final act of desperation, I sign up for yet another Rhapsody account and purchase the album using a fresh $10 credit. Again.
I had an unbelievably crappy first experience. Maybe I just got extremely unlucky. Maybe their store isn't that bad. But I'll never know. I already had a bad impression of Real Audio going in from their craptacular Real Player software, and this only solidified that for me. I do know Amazon. I use them all the time. They have great prices, a great customer experience, and great customer service. So go on over to the Rhapsody MP3 store before July 4 and get your $10 credit to milk them for some free tunes. Then abandon that account and get your music through Amazon's MP3 store.
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