Rhapsody Real Music Service will launch in Europe

From The Digital Music Weblog, comes the following:

According to RealNetworks CEO ROb Glaser, a Rhapsody music service from Real will launch in Europe within the next six months to one year. Interestingly, in portions quoted from a FInancial Times Deutschland by News.com, the launch of the music service has been conditional on the following: "Actions against file-sharing sites should intensify in Europe in the coming months. We are already seeing the first signs of this,'' Glaser told the paper. He added "European customers are still too much of the opinion that music is to be had for free." Mr Glaser also commented that the margins on Rhapsody's unlimited music service are greater than those on per-track download sales.

So let me get this straight: rather than getting paid for services to market quickly, the record companies and associations have decided to sue all their potential customers? Combine this with the two separate news stories that they want to increase the cost of digital music (even though it’s already far more expensive in Europe than it is in the US) and that CD sales are down for the fourth year in a row, and I wonder if the record companies actually want to destroy themselves.

From my point of view, that’s nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with price: I’ve bought a lot more music in the last couple of years thanks to being able to check things out before hand (and that’s mostly through those forward thinking bands and smaller record companies that allow you to do so), but I’ve bought most of it for less than GBP 9 per CD via Amazon, Fopp or CD-Wow, as opposed to the average high-street price of GBP 13.