MTV Merging Its Digital-Music Store Into Joint Venture With RealNetworks
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that later today, MTV Networks will announce that it’s merging its digital-music store into a joint venture with RealNetworks, the company that runs Rhapsody; the venture will also have mobile content, which will be distributed by Verizon Wireless. This move probably spells the end for Urge, MTV’s blog-filled partnership with Microsoft that launched last year to great fanfare, only to be promptly forgotten about once Bill Gates and comapny got distracted by a shiny new toy brown turd.
According to the WSJ, the new venture will have MTV-provided editorial content–including blogs–and it’ll be headed up by current Urge head Michael Bloom. It’ll also be heavily promoted on MTV, VH1, CMT, and the network’s other outlets. While I’m not too sure about how effective those ads will be as far as driving traffic to the new venture (those elliptical Urge ads that I’d glimpse during Subterranean and TRL didn’t seem to attract much in the way of a userbase), perhaps being outside Windows Media Player’s confines will help the new venture gain a little more traction (or at least blogs that can be linked to from the rest of the Internet).
