Heineken and RealNetworks
Now Heineken and RealNetworks have joined the music streaming business – streaming like lemmings, that is, to make sure they don’t miss out on anything.
The two say they’ve "joined forces to heat up the summer" for digital music fans. How original.
"2004 will be the year digital music takes off and Heineken is proud to work with a pioneer like RealNetworks to deliver the best digital music experience to consumers," gushes Heineken USA senior salesman Steve Davis.
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"Heineken’s tremendous marketing savvy and deep commitment to the music industry makes them the ideal partner to promote RealNetworks," gushes RealNetworks senior salesman Dan Sheeran.
Yes.
Rumours that Apple, Miller, Napster, Pepsi, Coke, Dell, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Comcast, Best Buy and all the rest of them are planning to merge their efforts into one gigantic online music store designed to vacuum all that download money they know is out there but haven’t figured out to get their hands on, probably aren’t true.
But wait. This isn’t about selling music. It’s about ‘presence’ – and making sure your and/or your product don’t miss out on anything, even if you don’t know what it is you don’t want to miss out on.
And speaking of strategic alliances and Hewlett-Packard, does HP’s deal with Apple to market an HP-branded digital music player based on iPod mean it’s dropping its HP branded online store?
Surely not.
"The music service will be run in conjunction with an existing service like Musicmatch.com and compete with music stores from Apple Computer Inc. and Dell Inc.," HPShopping.com ceo Peter Appl said a while back.
But none of it means anything anyway.
