MTV Networks is closing “Urge,” its also-ran online music outfit and is to merge the carcass with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody subscription music outfit, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith and Nick Wingfield.
This effectively ends Urge’s relationship with Microsoft (as if anybody cared).
The pairing of MTV’s service that nobody used with Real’s outfit that hardly anybody uses is, according to the WSJ report, “a bid to create a stronger competitor to Apple Inc.’s market-dominating iTunes Store.”
Good luck with that.
Full article (subscription required) here.
Greg Sandoval blogs for CNET, “RealNetworks, the operator of the Rhapsody music service, could use some help. The subscriber-based service has failed to make up much ground on iTunes, which recently announced that it has sold more than 3 billion songs and became the nation’s third-largest music retailer ahead of Amazon and Target.”
“But while MTV is a decades-old and very recognizable brand among music fans, the company has fallen behind when it comes to the Internet,” Sandoval writes.
Full article here.
MTV and Microsoft couldn’t even dent Apple’s iTunes Store dominance. It’s quite possible that Apple didn’t even notice Urge’s brief life at all. Remember that the next time some some analyst is out talking up the next big threat to Apple’s iPod+iTunes.
MTV has the kind of marketing muscle needed to compete with Apple. They have all their media properties, from TV to Internet. And they know how to sell music and music-related services. – Analyst Nitin Gupta, The Yankee Group, May 17, 2006
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