Goodbye Napster. Goodbye Rhapsody.

I loved Napster. For about 10 bucks a month I could listen to whole albums, make playlists of my favorite songs, download albums for listening when I was in a, ahem, low signal area (thanks, AT&T). A week or so ago, without much notice (I seem to recall an email about a week before the transition, and I’m being kind calling it a “transition”), I was forced to convert over to Rhapsody. Today I dumped Rhapsody. Here’s why.

For starters, the interface to the Rhapsody App (I have an Android, but can’t imagine the UI for the iPhone app is much better) is TERRIBLE. I’m a techie, so I know my way around gadgets, and how to do stuff. But this interface is squirrelly. How do I pull up my music? Hm. My Playlists? Nope, that looks like someone else’s playlists, I don’t recognize any of these songs.

None of my previous searches were remembered. I tend to listen to the same artists (tried “My Artists” but the list was flooded with a bunch of artists I’d never listened to) a lot, and each time I wanted to pull up a different, say, ELO album, I had to go into Search and type in Electric Light Orchestra (don’t even think of typing in ELO, that didn’t work).

The player was very skippy (ever heard of buffering, guys?). Soooo distracting when listening to a song, and *skip* play *skip* play *skip*. Ugh.

I can flag albums as favorites, but finding them was a bit of a pain. Not very intuitive (did I mention how crappy the UI was, okay, though so).

I don’t know exactly why Napster folded into Rhapsody, but it didn’t result in a superior user experience (I’m sure the folks whose stock went up as a result are crying over this).

Goodbye, Napster. I’ll miss you.

Goodbye Rhapsody. This was great. We should do it again sometime. I’ll call you.

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The King is Dead.

I didn’t drive my chevy to the levy. I didn’t hang out with people drinking whiskey and rye. But it was a sad, sad day. See, I’m old. Well, not old exactly. But, old enough to remember when Michael Jackson was cool. Really cool. We called him the King of Pop. And it was a moniker he earned.

Memories of watching MJ (before “MJ” was Michael Jordan) sing Dirty Diana, and before that, Bad… Wow. Remember skating to Thriller? I do. That guy was cool. And we loved him. I grew up to Michael Jackson’s music.

It doesn’t matter to me what he did to himself later, how he squandered away his money, whose ashes he kept in his home. That guy entertained us well. I’m going to miss him.