I was a subscriber to Urge music service from MTV until last October, when I got an email that said Urge was closing and my membership would be transferred to Rhapsody 25. It was given no details about this membership, except that I would have 25 free songs a month. There was no mention of what would happen to my purchased music, so I assumed it would still work.

In November, I tried to play or transfer to my mp3 player some music I had purchased from Urge. Windows Media Player refused to do it because the DRM was not valid. I was unable to refresh my licenses because Urge had closed, so I went to Rhapsody, downloaded RealPlayer, asked it to refresh, and it would not do it. I looked at my account and it did not have permissions to burn CDs or transfer to my MP3 player. For $14.95 a month, I could get RealPlayer To Go, which would allow me to do this. So, I must have signed up for it, but I certainly was not successful at getting my music freed up because they seemed to have no idea my music existed as purchased music.

You know me. I was frustrated so I just gave up for now. A few months later, I saw that I was being billed $14.99 a month for this service on a credit card. However, when I went to the Rhapsody account I had set up, it did not reflect that I had a To Go account.

Finally I called them two days ago. Turns out, they never moved the DRM over to their servers because "they couldn't." Something about DRM being specific to a server and when the Urge server was shut down all of the licenses were "lost." I suggested perhaps they should have purchased the server, too. And I was also told DRM is "fragile." The tech said I should have been able to play purchased music forever, unless "something" happened. I explained to him that Urge automatically refreshed your licenses every 30 days and so when I had tried to play the music in November, it had tried to refresh and could not.,

Basically, IMHO, Rhapsody stole $311 of CDs from me, which is what I told them. They offered to credit me with $100 and I said I wanted the full value of the music I purchased. I had to go to the supervisor, the tier 2 support guy, and finally to a special support person. I said that I could not be the only one who had this problem and they acknowledge this was true. I asked why we were never sent email explaining that they knew and he said he did not know. I mentioned that by not letting us know that they would credit us for purchased music, they were 1 - stealing our music and 2 - hoping very few people who take them up on the offer.

I told him that if they restored all $311, I would download RealPlayer, refresh my DRM, burn all of the music to CDs and close my account never to return. If they did not, I would make sure people knew what Real was doing. They have credited me with the entire $311, so I am going on a music buying spree today.

However, I still think Rob Glaser is stealing people's music and not being upfront about it.

Sabala, who started at Digg on February 6 as community manager and marketing director, is a SXSW veteran. (You can tell because she calls it "South By.") She was set on the idea of a party at the festival, but by Friday, she and the rest of Digg had decided it was a nonstarter. The next Monday, though, she gave it another try. A call to a Napa winery landed a sponsor for wine. A call to a contact at PureVolume secured the club for Tuesday night. With that, Sabala had a party that bridged SXSW Interactive's last day and the SXSW Music's first.

A few blocks away at Six Lounge, Revision3 was also bridging music and the Web, with a live debut of "Rock Band," Randi Jayne Zuckerberg and David Prager's homage to the guitar-wielding videogame at a party hosted by Rana Sobhany. Kevin Rose ruled Austin last night — he also cofounded Revision3.

Prager, Revision3's COO, told me Monday about the times he'd put money from his own bank account into Revision3's coffers to make sure it made payroll. Those lean days are long past for both of Rose's companies. Even as the stock markets waiver, Web startups seem flusher than ever. A Microsoft ad deal has buoyed Digg; the online-video boom is taking care of Revision3's paychecks.

Are we going to see this kind of party scene at next year's SXSW? Let's be clear: SXSW was a good time, not a boundless bacchanal. Nothing smacked of excess: A mild dose of star power is enough to intoxicate the deskbound Web designers who attend the festival. But I noticed that no one talked about the stock market once the whole week. SXSW was a comfortable bubble. As the Webheads fly back home, will they even feel it popping?