Thanks for the updates!

Real dumps Gracenote music service

Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC’s hard drive. Without it, we’d be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has been discreetly dropped by RealNetworks. A tipster alerts us that RealPlayer and Rhaposdy are now using All Media Guide’s identification service, Lasso. Real joins a growing list of AMG adopters, including Sony and Apple. It’s no surprise that the music services, facing thin margins, are shopping around.

http://valleywag.com/tech/digital-music/real-dumps-gracenote-music-service-301216.php

Thanks for writing in to set the record straight about Rhapsody.

Congratulations on the deal. It looks like a great opportunity to reintroduce the service and to expand it into brand new territory.

I saw this week’s post about the URGE/Rhapsody news, and wanted to respectfully tell you that you’ve got it wrong when you say that Rhapsody’s editorial comes solely from AMG.

While we do use AMG (primarily for metadata for albums and artists), the actual editorial recommendations and descriptions are provided by an in-house team of writers. Over the past six years, this team has written over 21,000 reviews for individual albums available through Rhapsody, and penned bios for over 19,000 artists whose music is available through the service.

Rhapsody also provides, through our relationship with Rolling Stone publishers Wenner Media, four decades of album reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, spanning 13,000 reviews from such admired critics as Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh and David Fricke.

In addition, Rhapsody offers some 40 years of mini-album reviews from Robert Christgau, one of the people who invented rock criticism as we know it today and a writer so eminent he’s only half-jokingly referred to as the Dean of American Rock Critics. Rhapsody users have access to over 8,000 of Chrisgau’s reviews.

Anyway, I just wanted to reach out and clarify the point. You’re right that URGE has done a lot to bring in esteemed outside writers to provide a richer editorial experience through the service. But we haven’t exactly been twiddling our thumbs at Rhapsody, either.