Monday, July 07, 2008

The deal is over

NOTE: It looks like this deal is over - I tried to get another boxed set today and Rhapsody only subtracted $9.99 from my order. Hope you got use from it before it ended.
Here's the original post:
I've discovered that you can trade My Coke Rewards points for any album on Rhapsody.com, including boxed sets that regullarly cost $180 on the site.
I was reading on one of my favorite websites, slickdeals.net, that Rhapsody was getting into the mp3-selling business by offering a free $10 credit for signing up for the service. Later, someone posted that they'd found a collection of The Doors studio albums, which goes for something like $60 on iTunes (the comparison to the actual boxed set isn't really fair because it also features a DVD of each album mixed for 5.1 sound). I'd already used my $10 credit up, but remembered that My Coke Rewards offered a free album for 225 points. I'd been saving up my points to get a gift card or something, so 225 was well within my grasp, and I took the deal.
As I was getting my Doors set, I realized that the credit listed in my Rhapsody account area was for one album, not any sort of monetary value. I wondered if it would work on bigger boxed sets that weren't sale-priced. I took a chance and traded in more points for another coupon, and tried applying it toward the Elvis Presley collection "From Nashville To Memphis: The Essential 60s Masters," a 5-CD boxed set that RCA put together about 15 years ago.
It worked! My 256K mp3 package started downloading and didn't finish until I had the whole collection, all 5.75 hours of it.
As I write this, I've just finished downloading the complete John Coltrane Quartet on Impulse set, which would regularly run $80 on the site. If you wanted to really stretch your points, the best deal I've found might be the 277-track, 18-CD Complete Bill Evans On Verve collection. Rhapsody usually offers it for $180, and Amazon asks $162.54. By my calculation, even if you don't really like Coke you can buy 23 12-packs for $92 at $4 each, or if you find a good sale, $57.50 for $2.50 each. That would mean that you could get the Evans download for roughly half off the regular price every day, or almost 70% off if you find a deal. Of course, if you're a jazz fan and not a pop fan, there's the question of what you're going to do with 276 cans of pop. I leave that to you.

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