Real Networks and Viacom are reorganizing Rhapsody, their joint-venture music service, and will be spinning it off into an independent company, they told the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s Napster, sell music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s a la carte download offering. But neither service has been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort. More shortly.

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A former Universal Music executive, now headed to Yahoo, explains concisely why his former employer and the other big guys are just playing out the string: CD sales are wasting away, and the digital boost they were counting on simply isn’t big enough.

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Underwhelmed with last night’s Super Bowl ads? So are the people who paid for them. The majority of TV ad buyers say they think their spots are less useful than they used to be. That’s potentially good news for Google and the Web, but it will be a long time coming.

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Google got a second ad for free last night: A Vizio ad that promoted YouTube, along with a slew of other Web services. But the ad did a lousy job of promoting the company’s Internet-connected TVs. Pity, because it actually has something cool to pitch.

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Here’s another publisher publicly throwing its weight behind Apple–and against Amazon–in the e-book pricing war. Hachette Book Group says it will pursue the “agency model” for pricing e-books: It sets retail prices and the retailer gets a 30 percent cut. In more practical terms, this means Hachette’s titles will be getting more expensive, and the rest of the industry will be following suit.

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Little Boxee, the much hyped Web video service, played a cameo role at today’s Congressional hearings on the Comcast-NBCU deal. And as sometimes happens when Boxee and big media intersect, controversy ensued.

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Former Google sales boss Tim Armstrong has brought a slew of former colleagues with him to AOL, but this may be his highest-profile hire so far: Dave Eun, who has been in charge of content deals at Google and YouTube, will replace Bill Wilson, one of the last high-profile AOL guys from the pre-Armstrong era.

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So, when’s that Hulu Premium service we heard about last fall going to show up?

If Disney EVP Kevin Mayer knows, he’s not telling. But for the record, he says, “no decisions have been made” about a pay service. Still, the site’s visitors will be asked to pay for something at some point.

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If you’re waiting for Apple’s iPad to rescue the magazine business, you may have to wait a very long time indeed. But the present-tense magazine industry–the ink-and-paper version everyone has left for dead–may be limping its way to a recovery.

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AOL CEO Tim Armstrong turned in his first earnings report as CEO of the newly independent company this morning. And his numbers don’t look anything like the ones he was used to reporting at Google–revenue plummeted across the board.

Then again, Wall Street has minimal expectations for AOL for at least a couple quarters, so Armstrong doesn’t need to do much to meet them.

After factoring out one-time charges, AOL posted earnings of 71 cents per share on revenue of $810 million. Wall Street expected earnings of either 62 cents or 66 cents per share, depending on who you ask, on revenue of around $766 million.

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Amazon caved to Macmillan’s demands on e-book pricing, and now the online retailer is set to give News Corp.’s HarperCollins a new deal too, says Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, don’t hold your breath waiting for Conan O’Brien on Fox.

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Condense a Steve Jobs pitch into 180 seconds and he sounds a lot like Billy Mays. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

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Is Microsoft is finally ready to a launch its long-delayed advertising exchange? Just barely.

Redmond is set to roll out AdECN, the “real-time” ad exchange it bought in 2007 within the next two weeks. But only in the most cautious of tests: Microsoft will open up AdECN to a handful of ad buyers and says it will only allow them to purchase a “select, limited amount of Microsoft inventory.”

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This excellent deconstruction of TV news, via comedian/writer Charlie Brooker, has been circulating for the past few days, but there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it since it never mentions the word “Apple,” “tablet” or “iPad.” If that’s the case, you should watch it now.

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It is all Apple, all the time in techland this week. Except at Reddit, where the social news site’s users spent most of yesterday obsessing about something else: A rogue ad.

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