Real Launches Music Download Service

fupeg writes "Spurred on by Apple's success, as well as their own purchase of listen.com, Real Networks announced their own online music service, dubbed RealOne Rhapsody. Here is the press release. They're offering songs at $0.79 per song, but with a $9.99/month subscription. The first two months are free. The press release says that 2/3 of their 300,000 song catalog is available for CD burning, while everything is available for 'on-demand' listening."

Re:The Real link....get it?

[CoolCat]

Read somewhere that they are using wma file format only [itavisen.no] (norwegian) ..

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Did they already try this and fail miserably?

[ih8apple]

Did they already try this and fail miserably?

It was called MusicNet. [siliconvalley.com]

From the link: "The original MusicNet that launched in December 2001 was a dismal failure...The subscriber numbers were so low that MusicNet has never been willing to state them in public."

Format please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me these aren't all in "RA" format? I know we are going to have to deal with some stupid rights management format but at least give us something decent?

Back-end economics?

[David Price]

Apple's service enables CD burning. Real's, presumably, doesn't for recent hits - tracks that the record industry is particularly interested in keeping off the p2p services. I don't know what the actual factors are that influence Real's classification of a track as burnable or not are, but I think this makes for a viable theory.

Real has slightly crippled their service relative to Apple's, but they are, in return, able to offer a discount to those users who download 50 songs or more per month.

Of course, we have to ask - who is doing the returning here? I'd be interested in learning what sorts of costs are being placed on the supply-side upon these services. Is the record industry giving discounts to services depending on the level of crippledness they impose upon consumers? I'd be very curious to know what the terms of the contracts are that Apple and Real signed with the recording industry companies.

Did I miss something?

[cbovasso]

I dont get why so many people pay per song when they can get them for free on Kazaa. Is this the moral line we are going to draw in the sand? I never understood the reasoning behind the idea of mp3's and p2p being illegal. Before the internet I used to tape songs off the radio and make mix tapes and trade them with friends. If thats not illegal how is this illegal? Because of quality? How can the output and not the act be the sole difference between something being illegal and something not. I don't get it. Am I being glib here?

IT's Real!!!

[TedTschopp]

How many of you trust or want Real to be selling you music.

This is from the company hides their free player, tricks you into purchasing an upgrade, and has an install process which hijacks everything on your browser.

Even if this was a good bargin I would reject if becuase it is from Real.

Ted Tschopp

what labels?

[schuster]

all I want to know is, what labels have they signed up yet? I'm betting the big 5 aren't going to be as enthusiastic about working with real on this

Re:Yeah right..

[Funksaw]

I don't know if I'd say that the above poster is a troll... I've had some pretty crummy experiences with Real. Each version has gotten more bloated, more intrusive... RealOne was when I finally gave up on the platform.

I'm not sure if this will take off. I'm betting on "no" because of two factors:

Subscription Fees are bad.

People like to own, not rent, music.

-- Funky

.79 per song per CD?

[SuperKendall]

I took a look at the site from your link and it was a little unclear if that was exactly what they ment. The wording sure makes it look like it's really .79 every time yoou want to burn a song, but it seems really odd they would charge per burn... if that's true then the service does not seem cheap at all, if you want to make a bunch of different kind of mix CD's.

One CD I'm working on now thanks to the Apple store is a mix CD of Wierd Al songs next to the original counterparts - so I have Eminem's "Loose Yourself" right before you get to hear "Couch Potato" (although currently the Apple store itself does not carry Weird Al stuff so I have to burn from CD). I probably wouldn't be making such a CD though if I knew I was going to pay .79 for each song on the mix and have to pay again to use it on some other CD!

SOS (Same Old Shit)

[asv108]

This model has been used before and failed miserably. Not many people want to listen to streaming music on their computer. While CD burning was a much needed feature a few years ago, today people want to be able to use paid downloads with their portable and home MP3 devices. Apple's iTunes service is great if you only have Macs, use an ipod as your portable, and don't have a home MP3 player like the slimp3, tivo series 2, or an audiotron. Burning a CD from a lossy format and then re-ripping in to MP3 is not going to work, especially when the CDDB data won't register. I doubt people are interested in manually entering ID3 tags.

For a music service to be great it needs to have some or all of the following characteristics.

• A HUGE catalog, similar to what is available for sale on amazon or cdnow.
• Standard formats that will work in existing players and devices: MP3, possibly others SHN,OGG,FLAC, AAC
• No DRM or DRM that doesn't treat the user like a criminal. Apple's DRM scheme is liberal but tying DRM to specific devices and platforms will not work with the other 97% of potential users. Any service needs to work with existing players so you might as well ditch DRM all together. Sharing a file downloaded from a service is not going increase "piracy" when there are already multiple methods to rip any music.
• Music encoded at different quality levels where users pay a premium for higher bitrate and/or lossless files.
• A multi platform www interface, there could be a tightly integrated client for windows, but there is no reason an interface can't work on all platforms.
• A sense of community: reviews, message boards, chat, etc. Apple's music service needs this..

Re:Cost breakdown

[Theaetetus]

99 cents/song
16 songs
$15.99/CD...

Yes/no... On the Apple store, if you want an album, it's only $9.95, not $.99/song - so a 20 song album costs the same as a 10 song album... and cheaper than that, it's cheaper.

-T

I'm sorry....

[captainstupid]

But why is this news?

Rhapsody has been around for some time, I've been a subscriber for about 6 months now. There are many different Rhapsody partners, Real is only the most recent. List of Other companies that have been selling this same stuff for a while. [listen.com]

Sure, real is offering cd burning at .20 cheaper than everyone else, but so what. I seriously doubt that Real was "Spurred on by Apple's success". There just the most recent of companies to negotiate a licensing deal with listen.com.

Meh...

Imperceptible watermarking impossible

[benwaggoner]

Others have sufficiently trashed the parent on the other topics, so I'll foucs on the watermarking issue.

Modern audio codecs use psychoacoustics, which encode the sounds the human ear and brain can hear over the ones that we can't.

Watermarking works by putting imperceptible sound in the signal that can't be heard, but can later be extractable by computer.

See the problem?

A codec at a "good enough" data rate (where no apparent artifacts are heard), won't be at high enough data rate to encode a robust watermark.

Re:Not so awesome.

[harlows_monkeys]

So, why should Apple lower their fee? It's already cheaper. The only way the Real model gets cheaper is if you download more than 50 songs a month, every month you're subscribed

You overlooked listening WITHOUT burning. Throw that in, and Real's prices look a lot better.

Re:SOS (Same Old Shit)

[slagdogg]

I agree with most of what you've stated. Unfortunately, I think that offering the user additional formats with different pricing models overcomplicates things. Personally, I know the differences between MP3, FLAC and OGG -- my Mom doesn't. If she were shopping at a store that offered all of them, she would probably be overwhelmed by the number of choices and just give up. It's great for the power users, but would be hard to sell to the average user -- iTunes has proven that people like a simple model ... "push button, get banana chip".

DRM = forget it

[agilliland]

I don't see how these companies survived this long. when will they understand that DRM = *piss off*

They need to realize that if they focus on refining the delivery mechanism for digital music first then they can worry about protecting their property further down the line. Right now they are losing buisness because its easier to find music and get it on Kazaa then it is anywhere else, but that can be changed easily.

Kazaa sucks ... lousy quality, unpredictable/lame download speeds, plus no guarantee of getting what you want. Give me a place that has ...

1. good quality rips
2. large selection
3. fast downloads
4. standard format

... and I am there. If companies would put DRM on the backburner for a while and focus on actually getting ppl the music they want then they would be in a much better position.

Two points to keep in mind

[inkswamp]

This has probably already been pointed out, but I see everyone comparing Real's service with iTunes on a per-song basis. Despite the fact that Real doesn't even cleanly defeat iTunes on that basis (you have to download lots of songs for that to work out) I haven't yet seen anyone bring up the fact that iTunes music is cheaper per album. I've seen many album containing 16+ songs in iTunes for $9.99. That's significantly cheaper than Real's .79 per song + monthly subscription fee.

The second point I want to make is that RealPlayer sucks butt on the Mac platform so Real stands to make zero inroads into the Mac market. I don't know what Real is like on Windows or elsewhere, but the Mac software is mediocrity in action. I wouldn't use Real's service at half that price unless they improved the lousy piece of dung that they pass off as their player. (Let's see, I close the main window and the application's menu bar disappears so I have to force-quit the damn thing. That's the hallmark of quality software.)

Never never never never.

[los furtive]

Real is on my short list for companies that will never receive a penny from me. My reason? Mostly because of the crap they try to pull when you install software, and then the crap they pull once it is installed.

You also have to debug the application too!

[mrklin]

Some gems from its term and conditions:

"6. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
You shall promptly notify Listen in writing upon your discovery of any unauthorized use or infringement of the Subscription Services (or their contents) or any patent, copyright, trade secret, trademarks or other intellectual property rights of Listen or its licensors."

Great, we are paying to be Real's beta testers.

"5 (d) Stolen Account Information Your Responsibility
You are solely and entirely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password, and for any and all activities that occur under your account."

So if somebody hacked its site and downloaded user info en masse I am responsible as well?

Re:I pay because..

[StarFace]

If you really want to support the artist, download the music for free and send them a check personally (as a gift, do not specify it is for the record, they might not legally be able to accept it, then.)

This what the industry is actually afraid of. Not "piracy." They fear a direct artist to consumer model, which is perfectly viable already in many different forms of media. The artists and consumers just need to wake up, some already are.

Re:Imperceptible watermarking impossible

[DrXym]

An mp3 has the entropy in spades to hide a customer serial number multiple times in multiple ways, all imperceptable to the user and all extremely difficult to remove. This could be down by encoding and downloading on the fly, or by modifying the mp3 data through a filter.

All this is quite feasible and there are numerous patents on the subject, software that watermarks other lossy formats such as jpeg, not to mention stego software such as mp3stego which can already accomplish this feat. There is nothing infeasible or problematic about it at all.

Wrong, wrong and wrong

[poptones]

Obviously you weren't around then, so I'll inform you: once upon a time there was radio, and records, and the audio cassette. Not only that, but many people (most all of them with a hi-fi) actually had decent FM tuners. A good FM tuner, receiving a quality signal, can provide incredibly good sound - far superior than any factory purchased cassette, which is all they were competing with because, after all, they killed the LP off when CD players were still too expensive for most home users. The music industry itself, in the late 70's/early 80s, primed the market for piracy.

They screamed bloody murder about the cassette while they spent milions shoveling out crappy soundalike megabands like Foreignstar Jourkansas - and then bitched when they started losing all their sales to tiny little labels like Stiff and SST (who actually had artists and a cool new sound) while the dinosaur crowd simply recorded the "hair classics" from the radio.

And how did they know what was on? Because disc jockeys, in a giant thumbing of nose at "the industry," began a very widespread practice of pre announcing tracks and running "album nights" when they would play entire albums without any interruptions at all. This further incensed the music publishers and is likely one of the biggest reasons they spent the last decade buying up virtually every station they could get their coke-sweaty palms on.

I know it's hard for a young person to imagine radio actually being cool and supporting genuine artists while thumbing its nose at the RIAA, but it really did happen - a long, long time ago, in a glaxay far...