It’s pretty clear that Rhapsody/Real is taking this targeting of iTunes seriously. Even in the midst of bugs in their download mechanism they are drawing new members by offering insane discounts! Just in the last week they’ve announced two serious $9.99 downloads– both anthologies in the form of box sets. The first one on July 4th was the Doors Perception boxset which included all 6 Albums– 90 tracks (this deal ended some time today). The next one announced this morning was The Complete Led Zeppelin Collection which included all ten albums, plus the live BBC sessions AND the 2007 Mothership remasters! That was 165 songs for $9.99! This offer is now done as well. I’ll try to keep posting these deals here as I find out about them.

The comments on the slickdeals.net posting where I found this has a bunch of people bitching about the sound quality of these mp3’s. They are supposed to be 256Kbps, but some folks think they can hear the difference between these and 192K rips they did of their own CD’s. I didn’t notice anything in my car when I listened to them, but I haven’t tried these with headphones. Admittedly, I was wondering how they spun all of this content up so quickly unless they could on-the-fly convert their DRM content. At any rate, the Led Zeppelin deal is still a HELL of a good one!