Monday, March 23, 2015

Springsteen- great site, until you try to buy

Springsteen: great site, until you try to buy
Hearing it live sparked my interest again, so the next day I logged on to his Web site. A pleasant surprise: last night'ssetlist was already posted. Each song has a link to the lyrics. The lyrics page also shows which album the song first appeared on--in this case I discovered he finally released "Trapped" on a compilation called The Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003. The album page contains streaming versions of almost every song, in both RealAudio and WMA formats.But there's no streaming version of "Trapped," there's no link to download the song, and on Amazon and iTunes, I can only download the whole album, which I won't do, as I have about 2/3ds of the songs on there. Too bad--they just lost a $0.99 sale. (I suspect that it's a publishing rights complication, given that this is one of the few songs on the site that Bruce himself didn't write.)Despite this letdown at the transaction point, I came away impressed with the Springsteen Web site and wonder why every major touring act won't offer the same depth of information. I've seen a few other big arena shows in the last few years--Rush, The Police, Roger Waters, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young--and usually I've had to turn to fan sites to get complete set lists the next day, then go somewhere else for the lyrics and album information.


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