It seems the good days for
music enthousiastics are coming closer. RealNetworks has announced today that it
will offer downloads of music files for 79 dollar cents, and the files can be
recorderd to a CD. This is the lowest price currently available but
unfortunately to US customers only. For $9.95 a month, people will be able
to access more than 330,000 digital music tracks on demand, with about 200,000
songs available for CD burning at 79 cents per song. The service also combines
custom radio and custom-CD mixing features.
 Listen.com's decision to offer low-cost CD burning as
part of the overall RHAPSODY experience is based on the success of a
promotion offering 49-cent CD burns in February and March. During that
promotion, there was a dramatic increase in sign-up rates from music fans
interested in RHAPSODY's unique combination of unlimited listening and low
cost burning, and subscribers' burning activity increased by more than
300%. Offering new CD burn pricing will make the service more appealing to
an even wider audience of music fans.
The new CD burning price is available to consumers who have subscribed
to RHAPSODY through Listen.com and a number of participating distributors
that offer RHAPSODY to customers under their own brand, including
Audiogalaxy, Charter Communications, Gateway, JamBase.com, RCN
Corporation, Speakeasy, Verizon Online, and RealNetworks, which last month
announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
Listen.com, the creator of RHAPSODY. The parties expect the acquisition to
be final in the 2nd or 3rd
quarter |
This development shows that there is space to lower the prices of music
and for the general public this will probably be a very attractive offer. There
are no technical details in this article, but it is likely that files can only
be downloaded in a RealNetworks music format and are likely DRM (Digital Rights
Management) restricted.
Source: Yahoo.com
