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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Want to sell a book to readers who own one of Amazon’s Kindles? Better make sure the price is very, very low. As in zero dollars and zero cents.

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Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store. Seminude pop star aside, this doesn’t seem as sexy as the Tablet of Tomorrow talk. But the fact that people are indeed buying magazines in digital form seems pretty relevant to me.

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Apple has purchased online music service Lala, I’ve confirmed with a source familiar with the transaction. Both Bloomberg and CNET reported the chats earlier today. If you’d like other confirmation, New York Times also reports that the deal has closed.

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In which a musician finds it very difficult to find out just how much money he’s made on the Web. Even harder: Making money from music on the Web.

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YouTube, which is already trying out the movie rental business, wants to get into TV too.

Google’s video site has been trying to convince the TV industry to let it stream individual shows for a fee. It envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

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Here’s yet another content creator that’s convinced Apple has a tablet device in the works: Condé Nast says it will have a digital version of Wired magazine ready for the purported gadget by the middle of next year and will eventually create similar versions for all of its 18 titles.

But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device–or even acknowledge that it has plans.

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Would you pay $30 a month to watch TV via iTunes?

That’s the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me. The industry finds this idea both tempting and terrifying.

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RealNetworks says more than 500,000 people have downloaded its all-you-can-eat music app. But it’s hard to tell what that number actually means.

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Want to learn how to steal your favorite movie or TV show? A 10-minute video starring a Paramount executive offers detailed instructions.

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It took Apple a year to move its first 1.5 billion apps from its iTunes store. It took a mere 76 days to move the next 500 million.

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A year ago, Apple’s iTunes owned about 70 percent of the digital music market, and newcomer Amazon had just five percent. Today, Apple still has 70 percent, but Amazon has…eight percent. In other news: People are buying music from Microsoft’s Zune store!

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Ready to toss dirt on the old, unloved CD? You’re going to have to wait a while. Compact discs are increasingly hard to find (at least in physical stores), but someone out there keeps buying them: The ancient format still makes up the majority of music sales in the U.S. And since album-length CDs are a whole lot more lucrative for the industry than iTunes singles, expect to see the industry cling to them as long it can get away with it.

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Waiting for the economy to come roaring back? So is Google. The search giant had a decent quarter, but not one that’s going to blow away Wall Street or convince anyone that the economy is roaring back. But it’s an okay performance for a media company in a recession.

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