It must pain Jann Wenner to see his other properties start succeeding where flagship Rolling Stone squandered possibilities and descended into irrelevancy: online. Now that US Weekly's site has heat, Wenner's finally starting to line up RS's strategy of "whatever."
Rob Glaser: screams to make the pain stop Rob Glaser, the CEO and founder of RealNetworks, likes to scream. One former employee tells us that his abuse is so virulent that at it's common for RealNetworks execs to leave the company only one or two months before they're scheduled to receive bonuses worth hundreds of…
MTV is continuing its push into digital music, despite its long litany of failures in the past, by introducing a music recommendation service and social network called Soundtrack. Most of the song recommendations will be based off of MTV's list of shows such as The Hills, Shot at Love, and G's to Gents.…
News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy's informants could have sworn they saw Digg CEO Jay Adelson at a party for RealNetworks last night. But Adelson, pictured left, was in San Francisco. So who was it? One possibility: A model who appears in the Clarins Men advertising campaign, right. Jay Adelson, mistaken for a…
RealNetworks' games business grew revenues 33 percent since the first quarter of 2007. CEO Rob Glaser thinks it could grow even faster on its own. RealNetworks announced today it plans to spin off the casual games business and "may precede the spin with an initial public offering and sale of up to 20 percent of the…
Citing a more challenging consumer environment, greater customer-acquisition costs and investor reluctance to pay above-market prices for shares, Goldman Sachs today cut price targets for Internet stocks including Google, eBay, and Amazon by 10 percent. For more reasons why Wall Street is suddenly less impressed…
RealNetworks purchased Macrovision's games business for $4 million. Last year, it bought a casual games site called Gametrust for about $20 million. It's all part of RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser's plan to be a player in casual games. Just like he planned to be a player in online music. You know, before Apple crushed…
The weekend saw the long-rumored sale of Yahoo's paid music service go through. Rhapsody America, a RealNetworks and MTV joint venture, purchased Yahoo Music Unlimited for an undisclosed fee, paidContent.org reports. Word has it Yahoo plans to supplant the service with a free, ad-supported service. To that end, it…
RealNetworks laid off a dozen pepole from its online music service, Rhapsody, the company says, a move prompted by the merger of Rhapsody with MTV's Urge. RealNetworks cut 100 employees in December. [SFWeekly]
Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October.
According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions…
Video-software maker and online-music retailer RealNetworks has laid off 100 of its 1,800 employees — two-thirds in Asia and one-third in its hometown of Seattle — to reduce redundancies produced from a recent spree of acquisitions. No word on when RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer is an also-ran to Adobe's Flash and…
Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. Without it, we'd be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has…
How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually…
RealNetworks, Pandora, Yahoo, and other Internet radio providers suffer legal setback when judge refuses to grant emergency stay against royalty rate increases. [News.com]
Bay Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is cutting small checks to startups developing apps on Facebook's F8 platform, VentureBeat reports. Sure, Bay is opportunistically trying to ride on top of the frenzy for apps written specifically for Facebook's user base of 29 million. But Bay's initiative, called …
Remember Real Networks? (Only when you ignore .ram files, right?) The media-distro company may be dead in the water, but when CEO Rob Glaser (pictured) talked to the Guardian, he tried his damnedest to run on pure spin. (Drinking game: Every time the Guardian's Kate Bulkley asks, "So such-and-such?" and Rob replies,…
