Real CEO says iPod users steal music

Real Networks' CEO Rob Glaser says iPod users are stealing music. In an interview with The Guardian, Glaser said that while users purchase some music from iTunes, most of their collections are illegally obtained. "If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution: it's called stealing. The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25, and there are many more songs on iPods than 25. About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends' CDs, which is illegal." Glaser noted that Apple's closed iTunes/iPod ecosystem pushes users to piracy to obtian non-copy protected, portable, interoperable music, but admits that Apple has been able to use iTunes to help drive sales of its iPod, where it makes most of its money, while other services struggle to make on money on music.

"Apple has gotten away with this approach to a greater degree than we thought they would," Glaser told The Guardian. The music industry has made a mistake, not by agreeing to Apple's fixed-price level (79p per track), which is what gets all the attention, but by allowing Apple to create devices that are not interoperable."

The CEO said that Apple's dominance was due to lack of compelling portable players--though he said Real was not interested in developing or marketing a branded device.

"We can compete but isn't it better to wait until you have a slam dunk solution in the portable context?," Glaser said in response to a question on whether or not he believed Real could compete with the industry-leading iTunes, which has more than 65 percent marketshare in Europe. "In the US a lot of iPod users also use our Rhapsody product, but we think being head-to-head is inevitable because Apple is pretty ambitious about how it wants to use its closed eco-system. At the same time, until there is a critical mass of devices out there that really are worthy competitors to the iPod."

Glaser aims to to make Real Music a "great product with differential features such as user-generated content and add on the subscription piece when the devices warrant it."

Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video