p2pnet - rss feed: 165-track Led Zeppelin box set: $10
p2pnet news view | Music:- One of the corporate providers seems to have come up with a genuine music download deal —- even if it was temporary, and even it was somewhat balky, from all appearances.
“The Complete Led Zeppelin (Box Set) is $9.99 @ Rhapsody,” said Simon Higgs in an email, going on:
“It’s 165 tracks. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but it’s downloading right now. :-).”
Like, the Complete Led Zeppelin Box Set? All of it? Not just a track or two?
Yes, said Simon. But it was a limited offer promo special although, as he pointed out, similar buys can be found on DealNews.
If his name seems familiar to you, Higgs is the author of The Guide to Selling Your Music in the ITunes Music Store, among other things.
On the box set, ” ‘The Complete Led Zeppelin’ MP3 Album download,” says the DealNews, going on >>>
The Rhapsody MP3 Store offers downloads of ‘The Complete Led Zeppelin’ by Led Zeppelin for $9.99. That’s $55 below the lowest price we’ve seen for this title on CD, which features 165 tracks that originally spanned 10 discs. (iTunes charges $99.99 for this MP3 box set.) The Rhapsody MP3 Store offers DRM-free downloads in 256-Kbps MP3 format.”
Says the Rhapsody site >>>
We’re bringing the album back: At some point during this digital revolution, we lost track of the album. You may remember it; roughly an hour of music with hit singles and underappreciated tracks, seamless transitions, and a true story - all of it created by your favorite artist. Well, the Rhapsody MP3 Store is bringing it back. You’ll save money when you buy full albums and hear the music the way it was intended to be heard.
Oh. 
Well, the P2P networks have been doing that for years and, like the other paltry few corporate download sites, RealNetworks has been fighting the P2P revolution tooth and nail since Day One.
But never mind that now.
“Unfortunately, the original full download (all 165 songs) crashed at just over 600MB and the zip archive is corrupt and useless,” said Higgs during his Led Zeppelin download epic.
He went on, “Downloading the tracks individually appears to be a one-time deal and apparently if you don’t get them, or if they arrive corrupted, you’re out of luck for another try. I’m in the middle of that now. So far, so good.
“The other weird thing is the track listing in the downloads section is out of sync with the box set tracks. Makes it slightly harder to figure out if what you’ve downloaded is right.”
And finally, “It eventually all downloaded.I had to break it down into 10 seperate downloads.
“Quite hard work for a $9.99 download! :-)”
heh
But still, and all, one could say it’s a kind of model of the way it could be if the Big 4 offered their customers genuine services at reasonable prices, instead of accusing them of being criminals and thieves.
All we need to do now is for ReelNetwerks to do an Apple —- ie, sell the tracks as loss-leaders while they wait for the Big 4 to drop their wholesale rates, as they’ll be forced to do sooner or later.
A Big Question, meanwhile, is: what kind of a deal did did RealNetworks strike with Led Zepp?
Stay tuned.
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.Stumble It!
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July 14th, 2008 at 8:19 am
I wonder if this means the Big 4 will try to sue them like they did AllofMP3 for the exact same reason.
July 14th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Actually, the labels will still get all of their money for this. We made a mistake in pricing for this album so we will eat the cost, not the label or the band. We decided that since people were so psyched about this we would continue to heavily discount box sets in the future, only announcing them via twitter and the real blog. If you’re interested in reading the post, here’s the address: http://realnetworksblog.com/2008/07/10/doh-2.aspx
July 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am
The Rhapsody deal is years late trying to play catchup with the resourcefulness of bittorrent.
Just go to any torrent site and search for “Led Zeppelin complete discography”
and Bittorrent is a vastly superior file transport techniology - you will always end up with a 100% perfect download no matter how many corrupt bytes are thrown at you.
July 15th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Making a large box set available via bittorrent would have made my life much easier the other day, that’s for sure. How about it Lacy? Having said that, at least you have give Rhapsody credit for showing up and then honoring that kind of deal - even if it was a mistake. It definitely gets customers into the store.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:29 am
More to come on this. Stay tuned.
Cheers!