It had been several years since Tim Bratton had founded and sold TuneTo.com in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom, but his father still had no clue what his son did for a living. So when his dad came up for the holidays, Bratton asked him a simple question: Who's your favorite artist?
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This was how Bratton started every pitch for his company's music-subscription service, now known as Rhapsody. Demoing the service for a record-label executive or a music fan off the street, the sell was always the same. They'd step right up and punch in their favorite artist, and if it popped up, Bratton made a sale. If not, Bratton remembers, "They'll go 'Oh, this thing sucks. That thing's a piece of shit, because it doesn't have the music I like!' "
This was a dance Bratton knew well. In 1998, he and four colleagues had dreamed up the idea of a jukebox in the sky, a treasure trove of every single song ever recorded that could be recalled by listeners anytime, anywhere, on any device, with unlimited usage, for a modest monthly fee. At first, they called the service Aladdin, because it seemed everyone in the post-Napster music industry was obsessed with the idea that the genie was out of the bottle—making money off recorded music was a lost cause, and touring and T-shirt revenue was all that was left of a once-bloated business.
"I remember thinking: 'Huh, well, the real story of Aladdin is, you know, Aladdin actually got the genie back in the bottle,' " says Bratton, a serial entrepreneur who now runs an online publishing house called Personal Life Media. "And that's what we're going to help the record labels do: We're going to do something that's so compelling, so easy to use, that even if this free stuff never goes away, that customers will be happy to pay for it because it adds so much value. It organizes their library. It makes it easy."
Bratton's dad's favorite artist was Tommy Dorsey. No problem: Rhapsody had plenty of the big-band titan's catalogue. They went through a few more artists, such as Glenn Miller, and Rhapsody was batting a thousand.
"Then he said, 'All right, I got one for ya. In 1955, I was in Las Vegas and I heard this woman sing, and I'd never heard her before, and I've never heard her since, and her name was Nellie Lutcher,' " Bratton remembers. "And I type it in and it popped right up. And he goes, 'Oh, I get it. I understand what you're doing now.' "
Ten years after its debut, the idea and technology now known as Rhapsody passed from TuneTo.com to Listen.com in 2001, and then to Seattle's RealNetworks when it acquired Listen.com in 2003. Last April, Real spun off Rhapsody into an independent company. Rhapsody remains the undisputed pioneer of the music-subscription business, and Bratton's vision of a jukebox in the sky has largely become a reality. For $10 a month, subscribers get what amounts to a 13-million-song record collection on their smart phones, PCs, Internet-connected televisions, car stereos, and tablets. Unlike buying mp3s, the consumer doesn't have to drag the songs to her iPhone or burn a CD to play the tracks at home. The entire catalog, along with users' own playlists and favorites, follows them to every one of their devices. It's an experience that vastly outweighs that of Napster, which lethally crippled the music industry, dorm room by dorm room, at the turn of the century. And it's seriously called into question the logic behind buying mp3s: one album for $10 on iTunes or access to 13 million songs for the same price?
Yet for all its virtues, Rhapsody remains a niche player in the digital-music business. The masses have not been sold, and Rhapsody's always been better at making their product hum than making the sale on a grand scale.
"With Apple, there were many years of almost-saturation-bombing advertising about the iPod, which created that halo effect," says Mike McGuire, an analyst with Gartner, a technology research firm. "Apple spent a lot of money advertising the iPod, then beyond on the iPhone and the iPad. The subscription guys have advertised, [but] not at that level."
By its 10th birthday in December, Bratton imagined ownership of digital music would have long since given way to leasing music on subscription services like Rhapsody. And he wasn't alone. Subscription services have been seen as music-industry life rafts almost since their inception. Even Rick Rubin, the current co-president of Columbia Records and one of history's most famous record producers (Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash . . . Josh Groban), prophesied a time when subscription services would save the record industry.
"In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere," Rubin told The New York Times in 2007 while discussing why he believed music-subscription services were the future of the recording industry. "The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to . . . Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."
