p2pnet.net News:- “RealNetworks has seen the first fruit of its self-declared war against Apple Computer – declining stock values and a deluge of anger from Mac, iPod and iTunes fans. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits recovering from life-saving cancer surgery, Real began its war (which it describes as a campaign in favour of freedom of choice) yesterday, offering cut-price song downloads, a community Web site and a petition – ‘Hey Apple, Don’t Break My iPod’.”

Thus does Macworld intro its RealNetworks versus Apple. War report here.

The ‘war’ is actually a childish snit between Apple and RealNetworks, both players in the insignificant corporate online music market, with Apple’s Steve Jobs (left) and Real’s Ron Glaser front and centre.

Apple wouldn’t allow music from the RealPlayer ‘Music Store’ to be ‘transferred’ to iPods. So Real came up with Harmony which lets people buy Real tracks and hear them on any player, whether Apple likes it or not.

Real’s Harmony mimics hymn, a free, independent application developed with the same objective in mind. It started out as PlayFair (aimed at Apple’s FairPlay consumer control DRM app) and became hymn (hear your music anywhere) after Apple did its best to stomp it

As its creator points out, “The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store (protected AAC / m4p) purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes.”

Hymn works (with a plugged-in iPod) on Mac OS X and many unix(-ish) variants, as well as Windows (with or without an iPod).

Now Real has pushed the spat a stage further by dropping the price of its downloads and as part of it’s new marketing plan, also started an online ‘freedom of choice’ petition.

However, as the Seattle Post-Intellgencer points out here, “But what the Seattle-based company heard from visitors leaving comments on the petition was quite different: RealNetworks, bug off.

“That message was delivered by so many people, so loudly and angrily, and laced with so many obscenities, that RealNetworks hastily changed its approach, cutting off visitors’ ability to post and read comments as part of the petition.”

In the meanwhile, 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.

Music industry shareholders could be enjoying HUGE profits generated by the p2p networks. But the Big Four marketing plan is along the lines: sue customers into buying ‘product’ at grossly inflated prices, and kill p2p.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2004 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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