Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Rhapsody

A Look At Napster Through The Years [GALLERY]

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:47:37 +0000

Between 1999-2000, Napster revolutionized the way that people were sharing music on the Internet. The service was a big wake-up call for the RIAA and the lawsuits started pouring in against Napster shortly after the service gained in popularity. Since then Napster was acquired by Best Buy and then sold to Rhapsody. Now Rhapsody is going to be merged officially into their on-demand music service, which will be the end of the Napster brand.

Napster originally launched in 1999 as a P2P file sharing service for swapping music files. It survived only about 2 years before being shut down by a court order. But it was too late. Consumer were sick of paying $20 per CD when all they wanted was one or two songs from that album. This paved the way for services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and Spotify.

Ironically enough, Napster co-founder Sean Parker is an investor and board member at Spotify. “Spotify is an attempt to finish what I started at Napster,” said Parker in an interview. Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning recently teamed up again on a new project called Airtime, which is a service that is similar to Chatroulette. It is a service where you can have random and real-time video chats.

Want to see what Napster looked like through the years? Check out the gallery in pages 1-9 of this post.

Rhapsody iPhone Application Gets Approved

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:03:45 +0000

RealNetworks Inc.’s paid streaming music service Rhapsody has been surprisingly approved on iTunes. Considering the amount of bandwidth that application possibly requires to work, Apple seems to be pretty lenient. Apple is also the #1 music retailer so allow a competitor into the system comes even more as a surprise. Apple generally rejects applications that would interfere with their business.

The application download is free, but new subscribers will have to pay $14.99 per month if they want to use the application for more than 7 days. Rhapsody users will be able to stream music from a collection of over 8 million songs. Rhapsody will work as long as the user is getting a cellphone signal or WiFi.

Rhapsody Making Its Way To The Apple App Store

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:16:51 +0000

RealNetworks’ streaming music software Rhapsody-To-Go will be submitted to the Apple App Store for approval this week. When the application gets approved, Rhapsody customers will be able to access on-demand streaming of over 8 million tracks within the company’s library through 3G and WiFi connections.

The application will work with the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPod Touch. Currently a Rhapsody membership costs about $14.99 per month, but the application itself will be free. Next RealNetworks will be working on a Google Android version of their application.

Spotify, a Rhapsody competitor submitted an application back in July too. Currently Spotify is not available for download in the U.S. The announcement was made on the Rhapsody blog.

RealNetworks’ Rhapsody Now Supports The iPod

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:36:39 +0000

RealNetworks, Inc. (NASDAQ:RNWK) is opening up a new feature for Rhapsody, their iTunes competitor.Â Prior to launching this feature, Rhapsody offered subscribers streaming copy-protected audio for a monthly fee and the file format was incompatible with iPods and iPhones.Â But now Rhapsody will be selling DRM-free MP3s a la carte and they will be compatible with the iPod and iPhone manufactured by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).

Customers will be able to access 30 second samples of each track.Â Most of the tracks will be around $0.99 per song and $9.99 per album.Â Rhapsody currently has about 5 million songs provided by Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI, and Warner Music.

To appease the demands of music labels, Real will provide “a strong emphasis on the digital album with merchandising centers for ‘new album releases,’ ‘old favorites,’ and ‘who’s on tour.’”Â Labels prefer to sell full albums rather than individual songs.

As part of the launch, Real offered the first 100,000 users to sign up for the MP3 store a free album.Â Real commands about 1% of the online music download market.

[Source: AppleInsider]

Best Buy launches digital music store – why?

Shan Sadiq — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:43:54 +0000

Best Buy (Best Buy Co., Inc) has partnered with Real Networksâ€™ Rhapsody and SanDisk to launch a digital music store. It will also start selling the SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody digital music player which will play songs downloaded through its music store. Best Buy plans to compete with Apple’s iTunes and Microsoftâ€™s Zune through this new service. It also plans to make sure its employees promote the service to customers. It looks like Best Buy will charge $14.99 a month for a subscription service and .99 cents for single track downloads. I for one do not think we need another retail digital music store. This has failure written all over it.

Best buy will essentially be competing with itself because it already carries a line of Apple iPods and will carry the Microsoft Zune which comes out this holiday season. I am not sure how Apple or Microsoft, who have their own digital music stores, feel about this move. I think that Best Buy needs to stick to what it does best â€“ sell electronics. Going into the digital music business is bad news for a retailer. This service will most likely fail before it ever gains any traction.