In what has to be the weirdest idea a music subscription marketing team had since someone came up with a commercial involving a museum and bunnies for Zune’s second launch, music subscription pioneer Rhapsody has announced that its teaming up with Best Buy to give away free music streaming.
According to the press release on the subject, the deal kicks off this week, and it involves users first purchasing a CD from Best Buy’s brick and mortar stores to get codes for one month of Rhapsody’s Premier Membership. Normally a Premier Membership would cost users $14.99 a month and allow users to stream music to as many devices as they want and download songs to three devices for offline playback.
Effectively, Best Buy is saying, “thanks for coming in our stores, and to show our thanks here’s an invitation to not come back for at least a month.” On the other hand, some users might like getting a physical copy of the music they were going to listen to on Rhapsody, plus a physical copy that doesn’t go away when they stop paying for the service.
Either way, its just odd.
