Look out iTunes! MTV, RealNetworks, and Verizon Wireless are coming after you like a tornado made of arms, teeth, and fingernails. The companies “announced they are teaming to create a single, integrated digital music experience that consumers can access via their PC, portable music device or mobile phone.”
The new venture is called “Rhapsody America” and will be MTV’s rebound to its failed marriage with Microsoft, who left their Urge music service to whither while it gallivanted around with a younger, prettier Zune Marketplace. The key difference for Rhapsody America will be over-the-air music downloads made possible using Verizon’s V CAST technology.
The basic idea is that former Urge subscribers, current V CAST subscribers, and current Rhapsody subscribers will now all be part of the Rhapsody software. If you download a song using V CAST, it’ll show up on your PC when you use Rhapsody. Likewise, you can send Rhapsody songs to your Verizon phone. This functionality will be rolled out over the coming months.
Will this whole deal be successful? Probably. Is it the next iTunes? Probably not. It would be great if it was available on all cell phones, not just Verizon, but the likelihood of that happening is hovering around the zero percent range since Verizon is a major partner.
Now if Verizon and Real teamed up with one of Real’s hardware partners (Sandisk, for instance) to make a digital audio player that had a free or low-cost connection to Verizon’s network allowing it to download music directly to the device, we might have something that consumers would find pretty useful.
MTV Networks, RealNetworks and Verizon Wireless Join Forces To Offer A New Integrated Digital Music Experience [PRNewswire]
Are you kidding me? A player (dedicated and large HD) that would allow me to spur-of-the-moment purchases and instant gratification? I’d jump all over that. Even better would be a subscription service (yeah, yeah, DRM is evil… but I really like the convenience) that allowed you to modify and update on the fly. Road trip but nothing fresh to listen to? No problem.
Back on the original topic–I recently canceled my Urge “To Go” subscription in anticipation of a major move (going from living with a girlfriend back to bachelorhood); but I fully anticipate starting my subscription back up. Given the circumstances, I’ll be in the market for a new cell phone/service at the end of the year as well. This could be a factor in deciding whether or not to stay with ATT or jump ship to Verizon…
It’s a music subscription service, so that’s strike one. It’s from Real, so that’s strike two. And there’s no indication that the OTA downloads will be any less stratospherically expensive than existing V Cast downloads, so that’s strike three. No thanks. While OTA downloads are intriguing, there’s nothing here that’s better than a nano, iTMS and a USB 2.0 cable.
Agreed. The whole V CAST thing, especially, might be the main factor holding this back since the downloads are so expensive. This looks to be another case of a few big companies coming together and saying “look how great our product is” without addressing what consumers actually want. It’ll be interesting to see how the final pricing structure works. Rhapsody to Go is $15/month while V CAST downloads are $2 a pop. It’d be suicide for them to charge both $15/month AND $2 per download but I could see them sticking with the $15/month and then adding a little surcharge every time you download new music…maybe $1 per track.