No Rock And Roll Fun

REAL AND FAKE: We're a little bit bemused by the decision of Real Networks to cut the price of their downloads (America only, of course) to 49 cents a pop in a bid to compete with Apple and the 79 cent iTunes. Since we know that Real is losing money on its full-price downloads, it's clear they can't afford to keep the price at that level forever, so where's the value of this offer to them? Either people will follow the lowest price - which means that when Real stops taking the enormous hit 49 cents suggests, and returns its price to normal, they'll disappear; or else people won't be affected by price changes, which means that they won't swap from iTunes anyway. If Real had a gloriously well-thought out offering, then the low price might work to tempt people in and then their magic could get them to stick - but, clearly, people have already decided that the Real store isn't worth paying extra for so it's unlikely the stunt is going to do them any long-term good. And, with Real predicting a loss of five cents a share for just the third quarter of the year alone, it could be a move which breaks the company for good.

If that doesn't, their other stunt deserves to: FreedomOfMusicChoice.org, which pretends to be a consumer-driven campaign, but makes a pisspoor job of covering up its actual nature - it's a Real Networks advertising campaign to try and put pressure on Apple to allow iPods to play downloads from all sources. (Generally, of course, organisations which use the word 'Freedom' as part of their name or slogan represent the polar opposite of freedom - see The Freedom Association) Real, of course, is on shaky ground when it starts to complain about nasty technology companies not allowing their competitors access to their players - unless I've missed something about their plans to make .ram and .rm and all their technologies open source? And to pretend that Real are in any way interested about Freedom of Music choice when their own downloads come with DRM to stop you exercising your freedom of choice to share music you've bought with your friends, the way you might have leant out CDs in the past, is a bit rich as well. The other curious thing about Real's ongoing battle with music players is the strange little blind spot they seem to have in making their downloads work across all players, as you can spot in their press release:

With Harmony Technology, RealPlayer Music Store supports more than 70 secure portable media devices, including all 4 generations of the iPod and iPod mini, 14 products from Creative, 14 from Rio, 7 from RCA, 9 from palmOne, 18 from iRiver, and products from Dell, Gateway, and Samsung. Generally speaking, Harmony supports any device that uses the Apple FairPlay DRM, The Microsoft Windows Media Audio DRM, or the RealNetworks Helix DRM, giving RealPlayer Music Store support for more secure devices than any other music store on the Internet..

No mention there, or on Freedom of Music Choice, about Sony's portable players. But then, of course, Sony also has control of lots of the tracks that Real needs access to. Even when you're only pretending to be a consumer pressure group, you don't want to piss off the people you need to do business with.

[Thanks to Alan at ACME for the Freedom link]