Gawker: valleywag, rhapsody

MTV launches another surely doomed music service

Alaska Miller — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:20:00 EDT

MTV is continuing its push into digital music, despite its long litany of failures in the past, by introducing a music recommendation service and social network called Soundtrack. Most of the song recommendations will be based off of MTV's list of shows such as The Hills, Shot at Love, and G's to Gents. RealNetworks' Rhapsody, which recently dropped copyright protections on its music files, will help MTV sell those songs, as well — though a tipster reports Rhapsody been having customer service and outage issues for weeks.

Rhapsody finally jumps on board the magic MP3 music bus

Jackson West — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

RealNetworks freeing its Rhapsody music store offerings from copy-protection chains is about "going after a larger audience and making a better customer service experience available to people," according to Real VP Neil Smith. It may be too little, too late — I doubt my mom will be shopping at Rhapsody again any time soon, and good luck convincing anyone younger than me to pay for MP3s. [Wired]

Thanks, Rob Glaser — now my mom cares about DRM

Jackson West — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:20:00 EDT

Intellectual property is, in many ways, my family's business. And over the years my mother Mary Deaton and I have had more than a few heated arguments about copyright reform. That said, my mom has been using Microsoft Windows since before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shed his diapers, and was ripping CDs to MP3 since I bought her a Rio MP3 player for Christmas with my dot-boom winnings. Since then, she bought into the system and signed up with MTV's now defunct Urge digital music service. But thanks to digital rights management, or DRM, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser is punishing her for such law-abiding ways — and charging her $14.99 a month for these "feature." Seems that in being migrated, like other Urge users, to Real's Rhapsody service, my mom lost the ability to transfer her music to her MP3 player or burn it to CD as promised. What ensued is a case study in bad customer service and the consumer-punishing idiocy that is DRM, and it's all after the jump.

I was a subscriber to Urge music service from MTV until last October, when I got an email that said Urge was closing and my membership would be transferred to Rhapsody 25. It was given no details about this membership, except that I would have 25 free songs a month. There was no mention of what would happen to my purchased music, so I assumed it would still work.
In November, I tried to play or transfer to my mp3 player some music I had purchased from Urge. Windows Media Player refused to do it because the DRM was not valid. I was unable to refresh my licenses because Urge had closed, so I went to Rhapsody, downloaded RealPlayer, asked it to refresh, and it would not do it. I looked at my account and it did not have permissions to burn CDs or transfer to my MP3 player. For $14.95 a month, I could get RealPlayer To Go, which would allow me to do this. So, I must have signed up for it, but I certainly was not successful at getting my music freed up because they seemed to have no idea my music existed as purchased music.

You know me. I was frustrated so I just gave up for now. A few months later, I saw that I was being billed $14.99 a month for this service on a credit card. However, when I went to the Rhapsody account I had set up, it did not reflect that I had a To Go account.

Finally I called them two days ago. Turns out, they never moved the DRM over to their servers because "they couldn't." Something about DRM being specific to a server and when the Urge server was shut down all of the licenses were "lost." I suggested perhaps they should have purchased the server, too. And I was also told DRM is "fragile." The tech said I should have been able to play purchased music forever, unless "something" happened. I explained to him that Urge automatically refreshed your licenses every 30 days and so when I had tried to play the music in November, it had tried to refresh and could not.,

Basically, IMHO, Rhapsody stole $311 of CDs from me, which is what I told them. They offered to credit me with $100 and I said I wanted the full value of the music I purchased. I had to go to the supervisor, the tier 2 support guy, and finally to a special support person. I said that I could not be the only one who had this problem and they acknowledge this was true. I asked why we were never sent email explaining that they knew and he said he did not know. I mentioned that by not letting us know that they would credit us for purchased music, they were 1 - stealing our music and 2 - hoping very few people who take them up on the offer.

I told him that if they restored all $311, I would download RealPlayer, refresh my DRM, burn all of the music to CDs and close my account never to return. If they did not, I would make sure people knew what Real was doing. They have credited me with the entire $311, so I am going on a music buying spree today.

However, I still think Rob Glaser is stealing people's music and not being upfront about it.

I have to disclose that my mom is a world-champion hissy-fit thrower, and a scourge upon dismissive customer service representatives worldwide. But seriously, copyright-law hard-liners like her former employer, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, should think twice about tangling with my mom and her collection of Ryan Adams downloads and ripped Lucinda Williams CDs. You have been warned. (Photo by AP/Ted S. Warren)

RealNetworks laid off a dozen pepole from...

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:03:07 EST

RealNetworks laid off a dozen pepole from its online music service, Rhapsody, the company says, a move prompted by the merger of Rhapsody with MTV's Urge. RealNetworks cut 100 employees in December. [SFWeekly]

You just can't quit Napster. Literally

Paul Boutin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:21:50 EST

Wired music writer Eliot Van Buskirk decided to cancel his online subscriptions. His anti-DRM talk made me sleepy, but what woke me up was the ludicrous amount of time Van Buskirk spent on the phone with Napster and Rhapsody. No doubt many subscribers hang up after half an hour and let the charges accumulate. The real moneymaker for these companies may not be DRM, but CRM.

"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin,...

Mary Jane Irwin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:25:23 EDT

"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television," he explains. Oh, you mean already extant services like Napster, Rhapsody, or Yahoo Music? [The New York Times]

MTV's history of digital-music failure

Owen Thomas — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:30:04 EDT

How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually broadcast much in the way of music these days; to the extent it's holding onto its youth demographic, it's doing so with a TV schedule packed with reality shows and teen soap operas. Do its viewers even know that the "M" in "MTV" stands for "music"? But never mind that. The reality of MTV is a decade-long history of complete and utter failure in digital music. The timeline of missed opportunities, botched deals, and general cluelessness, after the jump:

November 1996 Yahoo and MTV announce the creation of UnfURLed, "the ultimate guide to music on the Web." The site is promised to launch in January 1997.
January 1997 UnfURLed does not launch.
July 1997 UnfURLed launches, six months late. The site later disappears, forgotten.
February 1999 Viacom acquires Imagine Radio, a service which lets users listen to preprogrammed music channels, or create their own. (If that sounds a lot like Last.fm or Pandora, that's because it was a lot like those sites.)
May 1999 Viacom acquires SonicNet, an online music-news and information site.
August 1999 Amid Internet fervor, Viacom creates the MTVi Group as a rollup of its Internet websites, hoping to take it public to cash in on the market for Internet stocks.
August 2000With an IPO off the boards, Viacom reorganizes MTVi, giving control over websites like MTV.com and VH1.com back to their respective cable channels.
2001-2004 MTV does nothing interesting with Internet music for five years or so, as best we can tell.
April 2005 MTV launches Overdrive, a broadband "channel." MTV later brags about how many "video streams" Overdrive serves, not noticing the complete apathy with which music fans greet it.
July 2005 News Corp. swoops in and inks a deal to buy the parent company of MySpace. Viacom is widely reported to have been interested in buying MySpace, which gained popularity by embracing music on user profiles and getting bands to use the site to communicate with fans.
January 2006 Microsoft and MTV launch Urge, an online music store.
August 2006 Google and MTV announce an experimental deal to distribute videos over Google's AdSense network. The experiment, apparently a failure, dissolves quietly.
September 2006 Viacom CEO Tom Freston, a longtime MTV exec, is fired, reportedly for missing the chance to buy MySpace. Later that month, Microsoft knifes MTV in the back by announcing its Zune player and companion store, rendering Urge pointless.
August 2007 MTV merges Urge into RealNetworks' also-struggling Rhapsody music service.

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