Real launches price war
p2pnet.net News:- Apple and RealNetworks are still at each other’s throats over who gets the largest share of the insignificant corporate online music business.
Having already given the finger to Apple with Harmony, RealNetworks is now doing it again by slashing its download price.
As of today, punters can buy the same Big Music ‘product’ offered by Apple for 49 cents instead of a dollar – well, 99 cents. Or they can get albums for half price.
Harmony is a corporate rip-off of PlayFair/HYMN, an application developed by an iTunes lover so he could play his music anywhere, on anything – something Apple expressly forbids.
Named PlayFair in tribute to Apple’s FairPlay consumer-control DRM package, PlayFair was stomped by Apple’s legal teams, only to reappear as HYMN.
Real’s new logo is a lock, unlocked – and built around an iPod.
Of course, very few online music lovers use RealNetworks in the first place, and the same applies to Apple’s iTunes.
Like the other plastic online music ’stores’ supported and supplied by the Big Four record label cartel, Real and Apple have only 750,000 tracks or ‘product’ available to them. And they’re the same tracks.
Against that, last month alone, some 8,250,000 p2p users were online at any given moment, and there would have been more had it not been the holiday season, Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland told p2pnet. Shared files for the month were close to one-and-a-quarter BILLION.
Big Music’s shareholders could be enjoying vast profits generated by the p2p networks. But the Big Four labels would rather try and sue their ex-customers into buying ‘product’ at grossly inflated prices, and destroy the burgeoning commercial p2p industry.
Apple is also under attack in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg where a Dutch music retailer is promoting a new download service.
Apple had been planning to make Europe its own.
August 17th, 2004 at 5:05 pm
For a real (n.p.i.) pricewar, there’s still nothing like AllOfMP3.com With the almost-free price working out to a penny per megabyte, and music downloads available in any format including lossless, even the cut-rate Real deal has a long way to go to approach this.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1321
August 18th, 2004 at 9:18 am
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/186748_real18.html
a story about some ‘real’ shenanigans.