Saturday, January 05, 2008

How to cancel Real's Rhapsody

Go to help A-Z , cancel my account and phone the number which is 1-866-597-5465 and tell the nice customer service people you want to cancel. There is no online way to cancel and I could find no other link for cancellation except buried deep within help. Earlier today, I tried via the "edit account" and a screen offered a subscribe button for a service I already had! Needless to say I did not push the button and turned to the help instead, so maybe another screen after the subscribe button offered a way to cancel, though the customer rep said you could only cancel by phone.

Real should be ashamed of themselves. BTW I got 4 months of a total of 6 months of $15 bills refunded by taking the 5 extra minutes to escalate to a supervisor, which was appreciated. I had offered to forgo the refund if they would provide an obvious way for everyone to cancel online, but of course the help dept could not do that.

A quick search revealed others on real networks own support thread with similar problems:

from Mar 2007

Another thread on Rhapsody as recent as Dec. 2007 discussed the ethics of the lobster trap cancellation policy, easy to sign up for free trial, but very hard to find your way out.

Finally this amusing investigation in PC World by Tom Spring included an attempt to cancel Rhapsody account and another real product, both of which proved difficult.

A representative of RealNetworks, told him it was an single mistake . When he showed them it happened twice they promised to investigate both incidents,

Very good - investigations underway; only problem is Spring's article is dated December 22, 2006.