Music industry watch

Real stops selling music at a loss

[ I just downloaded and I am trying out the 2.0 beta of ecto -- looks very slick so far and a great improvement over the old Kung-log. I like the easy with which I can create hyperlinks -- copy a link into the clipboard, highlight some text in the post, hit the link button. The link dialog does all the right things (like take the link from the clipboard) and normally hitting OK is all that is needed. Very nice! ]

As I blogged earlier, Real was selling music for $.49 in order to bring in some customers. Now Real has stopped selling most of its music at a loss:

The company on Thursday labeled its music promotion a success, with more than 3 million singles sold during the three-week campaign. The aim was in large part to highlight its new "Harmony" technology that allowed songs sold through RealNetworks' store to be played on Apple Computer's iPod, despite Apple's opposition.

"It was very successful for us in terms of signing up thousand and thousands of new customers," RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert said.

I wonder if it really worked, or the finally realized that the move was insane. I guess we'll have to watch their quarterly numbers to find out.

Posted by Mayhem at September 9, 2004 11:50 AM