Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Get Real

Seattle-based Real Networks appears to be upping the anty in its battle with Apple and its hugely successful iTunes website for paid online music downloading supremacy. Just a week ago, they introduced a promotional "half-price sale", lowering the price per song from 99 cents to 49 cents. And this morning, they announced a pilot program with two universities allowing students to subscribe to the Rhapsody monthly service at a steep discount (link here); students would pay $2 to $3 per month for access to unlimited music downloading. Hmm. But don't they download songs for free already. Yes and no. While peer-to-peer "sharing" is still very common, universities have really cracked down on the practice, usually by limiting the bandwidth of dormitory broadband connections at night. And Real Networks is betting that students would opt to pay the nominal charge for the convenience of not having to hunt for songs via peer sharing networks, the assurance of a quality download, and the legitimacy of having legal ownership of the songs. The two pilot campuses? The University of Minnesota and my alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. The execs at Real Networks are a crafty bunch. One can't dismiss the audacity of their latter choice. Berkeley is not far from Apple CEO Steve Jobs' "other" office at Pixar Studios in neighboring Emeryville (or from Apple headquarters in Cupertino, for that matter); and Jobs' close friend and Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniack, is a Berkeley alum and continues to have strong ties to the campus. It's getting ugly.