"They've put their entire catalog, going back to the early days and on through the most recent stuff... it's all up on our Rhapsody music service. That's over 500 tracks and forty years of great music."
Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser. His company is teaming with Best Buy stores to promote the Rhapsody service... which faces increasing competition from Apple's iTunes store..which plans to be available to Windows users later this year... along with the reincarnation of Napster... MusicMatch and others. Glaser says Rhapsody will be offering individual songs for sale... along with its subscription service ... .following the Apple model. With all the competition... which of the online music services will survive? Glaser says...
"I love the hand we have in this. We've got over 330 million registered users around the world that have our Real Player or RealOne player... so we've got a huge base out there. Really there's only two companies out there that have that kind of presence of music player or media player on the PC. I look at all the assets we have and all the pieces we have and in my view... the competition should have a nice time eating our dust."
The competition could include Microsoft... which has already launched an online music service in Europe. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.