Remember when RealNetworks decided to wage war on the iTunes Music Store by lowering song prices at its Rhapsody service to just 49 cents, and offering albums for only $4.99? Well, here's hoping you didn't sell your Mac, buy a Wintel, migrate all your data, repurchase all your apps, and pay a few thousand dollars for a total frontal tastectomy to make the transition bearable in hopes of making all that cash back on Windows-only Rhapsody song purchases, because faithful viewer Ken Drake informs us that, as reported by the Associated Press, Real's "limited time" half-price scheme has just ended. And according to Real, at least, it was a smashing success, although we can't help but wonder about their criteria-- specifically, did they originate on another plane of existence with drastically different standards of "success," or is Real's PR department just spinning more wildly than a breakdancer with an inner ear infection?

See, according to USA Today, Real is actually bragging that in the three weeks during which it sold songs at half-price, it averaged a million songs sold per week. It's rosy-cheeked and grinning because "its market share rose to 20% from 10%," but perhaps more importantly, because it claims that "Apple's 70% share... dropped to 60%." And indeed, we could consider that a success-- if it weren't for the fact that Real lost $2 million during those three weeks by selling songs below its cost. Using any math which we've ever encountered, if you're losing money on each item sold, you're generally financially better off if your market share goes down, not up. In other words, Real's celebration is essentially "We're not just losing money-- we're losing it faster! Hooray!"

Okay, fine, we understand the "loss leader" concept: sell something at a loss to rope in the buyers, then make the money back on increased sales of something that's actually profitable. But since every song Real sold during the promotion period was below cost, there was nothing to offset the loss, unless maybe it saw a big upswing in rental music subscriptions or something. The idea is a little more sound moving forward, as Real intends to continue to offer its top ten songs at the loss-leading price of 49 cents apiece, while everything else in the store goes back up to 99 cents. But since there's no physical trip to the store influencing the convenience factor and no shipping costs to encourage buyers to bundle their purchases together, why wouldn't someone buy just the cheap songs from Real and then get anything else they want elsewhere?

Apple, meanwhile, says "liar, liar, pants on fire," claiming that Real's market share figures are wrong anyway; faithful viewer Peter sent us a MacMinute article in which Apple insists that "during the last three weeks [it] did not see any drop in [its] market share, and [its] sales grew each week." Heck, even if you believe Real's figures, they weren't all that great anyway; a million songs a week? That's only a quarter of the number that Apple sold, and Apple did it at twice the price-- and actually made money on each song instead of losing it. Geez, think about it for a second: Apple sold a million songs a week when the iTMS debuted, and that was when its audience was restricted solely to Mac users running Mac OS X. So Real has, conservatively speaking, a potential market ten times the size, and yet only managed to tie the iTMS's original sales figures by cutting prices in half and losing $2 million in the process. People actually buy stock in this company?

And don't forget, the whole point of Real's half-price promotion was to lure iPod owners who wanted "freedom of music choice." If nothing else, we'd consider this definitive proof that Real's oft-repeated premise-- that there are zillions of irate iPod users out there just clamoring for the option to buy their music at a store far suckier than that irritatingly seamless and easy-to-use iTMS-- is a crock of steaming brown stuff. Since Apple still hasn't blocked Real's "Harmony" software that makes Rhapsody songs compatible with the iPod, for three weeks iPod users had freedom of music choice (well, the Wintel-using ones did, anyway; Rhapsody still isn't Mac-compatible), and they appear to have stuck overwhelmingly with iTunes, despite paying twice the price for their music by doing so.

As for Real's post-promotion sales, well, how much do you want to bet that Real won't be crowing about its market share anymore when next week's figures come limping in? We're not even remotely convinced that Real's increase in market share didn't evaporate overnight when the sale ended, meaning that the company most likely burned through another $2 million and has nothing sustainable to show for it except that big $2 million-shaped hole in its corporate checking account. According to USA Today, "Glaser says the finances will work out in the long term." Well, you know what they say: you gotta spend money to lose money. And Real seems to be doing an admirable job of both.