RealJukebox

» see real.com/realjukebox as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed realjukebox. by 1999 i was on winamp and getright on a windows machine in turkey. the realnetworks side of windows audio was for streaming content i mostly did not consume on dial-up. realplayer ran in the background for the rare bbc or cnn audio stream that someone linked to. realjukebox arrived as a separate program for managing the mp3 collection winamp already played, and i never had a reason to install it.

realnetworks released it in may 1999 as a free download with a paid plus tier. the basic version capped mp3 ripping at 96kbps and disabled crossfading along with disc burning past a low limit. the plus tier removed the caps for a one-time fee. the pitch was a single program that ripped your cds to mp3 and organized the library, with cd burning and playback built in. on paper it was the windows equivalent of itunes two years before itunes existed.

the rollout looked good. real had real distribution through windows oem bundles and through the install base of realplayer, which by 1999 was on a huge share of windows machines that did any kind of streaming. realjukebox shipped on diamond rio mp3 players and on shareware cds. within months it had a meaningful share of windows-side mp3 management traffic against musicmatch jukebox and winamp.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the timing was right. mp3 was the format everyone wanted on a windows pc by late 1999. cd ripping was still a multi-step ordeal for most people. one program that handled the whole pipeline from cd to library to portable player was the right product for the moment. realjukebox shipped before itunes for windows by four years and before windows media player got serious about ripping by about two.

the bundled-with-realplayer install path got it onto millions of windows machines without anyone making an active decision to install it. that distribution advantage was supposed to be the moat. it became the source of the problem instead.

~ the postmortem ~

on 1 november 1999 a security researcher named richard m. smith published findings showing that realjukebox was sending a unique user id back to realnetworks along with information about what cds were being ripped and what songs were being played. the program had not disclosed any of this in its installer or its privacy policy. the slashdot writeup hit the same day. by mid-november the story was on cnn and on the front page of the new york times.

realnetworks issued a patch within days that removed the tracking and apologized publicly. a class-action followed. the damage to the realnetworks brand was the real cost, in 1999 the word 'spyware' was still being defined as a category, and realjukebox got cast as the canonical case of a mainstream commercial product caught doing it. winamp and musicmatch never had that problem.

the product limped along through 2000 and into 2001. realnetworks announced realone player on 4 december 2001 as a unified replacement that combined realplayer with realjukebox into a single application. the realjukebox brand retired with the announcement.

~ the inheritance ~

realone player itself lasted about three years before getting folded back into realplayer for the second time. the spyware story did not die with the product. it became part of the standard reference for how not to ship desktop software, and it set the template for the consent dialogs that os vendors started enforcing later in the decade. itunes for windows shipped in october 2003 with a much cleaner stack and took the rest of the windows mp3-library audience over the next few years.

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