Tuesday, August 17, 2004

WSJ.com: Price War in Online Music

WSJ.com: Price War in Online Music "As part of a mounting campaign against market leader Apple Computer Inc., rival RealNetworks Inc. is slashing the cost of downloading music. Starting today, and for the next three weeks, the Seattle company, which sells tunes over the Internet via its RealPlayer Music Store, will drop its prices to 49 cents a song and $4.99 an album. That's compared with the 99 cents a song and $9.99 an album that is standard on Apple's iTunes Music Store and on other sites. The price cut amounts to a music sale of massive proportions because it applies to all 630,000 songs on the RealPlayer Music Store and most of the albums available on the site.
The move is a surefire money-loser for RealNetworks in the near term because it will be charging consumers substantially less than it pays recording companies for the music. But RealNetworks is using the sale to highlight its broader effort to unseat Apple, which by some estimates has a 70% share of music-download market."

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