Rhapsody (online music service)
Rhapsody was an American online music service operated by RealNetworks .
history
The service in its current form has its origin in the radio-on-demand service TuneTo.com. A team of developers led by Tim Bratton was commissioned to program a high-quality streaming engine for this service. After TuneTo.com was taken over in 2001 by the Californian startup Listen.com, which at that time had already secured the streaming rights for a considerable independent music library, the service was ready for the market in December 2001 under the name Rhapsody.
At that time, Rhapsody was the first online music service that gave the user complete access to the entire music inventory for a fixed monthly price. Therefore, the big record companies were also quickly ready to license their catalogs. As early as the summer of 2002, the entire inventory of the five largest music labels at that time ( BMG , EMI , Sony Music , Universal Music and Warner ) was available on the Rhapsody platform, which was a sensational innovation for the time. So far, the stocks of the big labels were only legally available through different, mostly proprietary, services.
Shortly before the opening of the iTunes Store by Apple in April 2003 whose rival RealNetworks announced an acquisition of Rhapsody. On August 3, 2003, the acquisition was completed and the service temporarily renamed RealRhapsody. However, it was quickly decided to revert to the shorter and well-established brand name Rhapsody.
In October / November 2011 Rhapsody bought the competitor Napster .
During 2017, Rhapsody became Napster, but offers the same service.
functionality
The use of Rhapsody requires special client software that masters the proprietary DRM process Helix. The music tracks can only be played using this software; an existing Internet connection is also required. After canceling the subscription, you can no longer use the streaming functions. In the meantime, however, there is also the additional option of purchasing individual tracks, similar to the iTunes Store, and permanently saving them on your own hard drive via download (pay-per-track). In this case, the purchased titles can still be played even after the service has been terminated.
For a monthly surcharge, it can also be played on certain mobile players. Regular synchronization with the Rhapsody client is required here in order to verify the continued use authorization.
Rhapsody was (before the renaming) only available in America.
Legal disputes
Apple
Due to the widespread use of Apple's iPod music players, Rhapsody's pay-per-track function in particular soon suffered from considerable competitive difficulties. Many iPod users preferred to purchase their music from iTunes so that they could listen to them on the go, while Rhapsody only supported less common players from other manufacturers. RealNetworks therefore decided to make the titles acquired via Rhapsody playable on these devices in order to remain competitive with the iTunes Store. For this purpose, a plug-in called Harmony was made available to the users, which transferred the tracks to the Apple AAC format with the FairPlay DRM system .
Apple countered this with a modification of the iPod firmware, which prevented the playback of titles converted in this way. This led to a development war between the two manufacturers because the Harmony plug-in was also constantly being adapted. RealNetworks also responded with drastic price cuts (well below iTunes levels) and ran numerous advertising campaigns.
Because of the threatened legal dispute, the further development of the Harmony plugin has meanwhile been stopped.
Further
The metal band Rhapsody was forced to change their name to Rhapsody of Fire in 2006 after a long trademark dispute with RealNetworks . Since the band was founded many years before the music service was launched, this move met with considerable criticism in the music scene.