The Living Rockumentary

Hen, Because I had Audiogalaxy, which was free and then got shut down, then morphed into "Rhapsody," which has the same general setup as the way you describe Listen.com, they let me use Rhapsody free for a month. However, in order to keep it, I would've had to pay $10 a month, which also gave me the capapbility to burn 10 tracks per month to a CD (annoying since most albums have at least 12 tracks per). Also, they did an even more annoying thing. They'd have entire albums available to download EXCEPT for one track. Not with every album, mind you, but about 3 out of every 10 albums I downloaded. And their catalogue was just as you might suspect. Hundreds of unsigned artists you've never heard of desperate to get people to hear them plus all the household names. But often all the household names offered were greatest hits collections or scenarios like Beth Orton's latest album where that one track was unavailable. Doesn't sound like a setup that'd work. As for Listen. com, let's do some math- say you want Abbey Road. You've dropped 10 bucks for the subscription, now you have to buy your own CD-R (which is not that much if you buy in bulk, but if you don't, could be about a buck or two), so you're around $11.50. There are 17 tracks on Abbey Road (some of the medley ones are pretty short)- at 40 cents each, that's $6.80. So you've paid $18.30 for a homemade disc with no artwork, liners, lyrics or CD case. And how do you download the tracks? Would the program isolate and insert spaces between the songs that are medleyed together? Do prog-rock or jazz fans automatically get a better deal because track lengths are longer and they don't end up paying as much per album? There are still many details to iron out just from a user's standpoint, nevermind the issues facing labels and artists. Something will happen, of course. It'll be interesting.