Buy Music for Your Palm from Real's New Store

RealNetworks, Inc. and palmOne have just announced that, beginning today, consumers can use the Zire 71 and most Tungsten handhelds to play music purchased from the new RealPlayer Music Store. This marks the first time a handheld or smartphone will be able to directly transfer and play secure, digital music purchased from a major music download service.

Real's new music store can be found in the My Library section of RealPlayer 10, the desktop version of this software. Through a "drag and drop" process, consumers can transfer secure music to their Tungsten T3, Tungsten T2, Tungsten T, Tungsten C, Tungsten E, and Zire 71 handhelds.

To enable support for the RealPlayer Music Store on these devices, RealNetworks has integrated RealAudio 10 with AAC and its Helix DRM (digital rights management) for Devices into the RealPlayer that runs on palmOne handhelds. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is also the format used by Apple's iTunes Music store.

The RealPlayer Music Store offers more than 300,000 tracks from all five major music labels as well as two-hundred independent labels. Individual songs cost 99 cents, while most albums sell for $9.99. As a special promotion, any U.S. consumer will receive their first song download from the store for only 10 cents.

People who already have the RealPlayer on their Palm will need to upgrade to RealPlayer 1.5, which was just released today. The only significant change in this new version is support for the secure format.

More information is available on the RealNetworks web site.

In addition, RealNetworks said that, by the end of this month, it intends to release a version of RealPlayer for the Treo 600 smart phone.

This announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show, which is starting today in Las Vegas.