RealNetworks to aquire streaming music service Listen.com

April 22, 2003

Realnetworks has announced it will aquire
Listen.com. Listen.com is one of the companies that is trying to get a share in
the legal internet music market and is offering a streaming music service. Of
course the company is using Real streaming media and offers no option to
download and or burn the music files. Listen.com will be sold for about USD 36
million and Realnetworks expects the company to make losses during the first
months of the merge.

It is however a little strange that
Realnetworks has bought Listen.com, as it's also a big shareholder
of Musicnet another legal internet music service. But it seems to
have lost intrest in this initiative.

The
companies said that bringing Listen's online music subscription service,
dubbed Rhapsody, closer to RealNetworks' RealOne product will help both
services in the market--despite the fact that Rhapsody technically
competes with a rival that is partly owned by RealNetworks.
"We see this as doubling
down on our business," RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser said in a conference
call with reporters. Listen has spent more than $100 million over the
years, creating a service that Real would be hard-pressed to recreate on
its own, he added.

The Listen.com acquisition is perhaps most
notable for the shadow that it casts on RealNetworks' ongoing relationship
with MusicNet, the rival subscription service it helped create in 2001,
and in which it is still a near-40 percent owner. Real is a joint owner of
MusicNet with Bertelsmann, AOL Time Warner and EMI Group.

Realnetworks will need to have share in most music
streaming services, also to make sure they will use the Real Media format.
However there are many competing formats and the streaming music market seems to
becoming a huge one. And then there's their biggest rival: Microsoft. Read the
entire article here.

Source: News.com