Apple to offer iPod/iPhone subscription music at last?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 19 March 2008 16:38

Your IT - Mobility

The FT is reporting that: “Subscriptions would work only for its iPhone devices, where it has a monthly billing relationship with customers through the mobile phone operators offering the device, while the “comes with music” model would work with iPhones and with iPods.”

Apple itself could easily start up a monthly subscription model through iTunes. Millions of customers already have their credit card details entered into iTunes – why would subscriptions only be limited to the iPhone? It doesn’t make sense to me.

I’d imagine Apple wanting to offer subscription music for the iPod and the iPhone – they have the infrastructure to process payments from credit cards, after all, and they have the distribution model of iTunes to do it.

Still, there is one smart thing the music industry is considering, says the FT – allowing subscription customers to “keep up to 40 or 50 tracks per year, which they would retain even if they changed their device or their subscription lapses.”

I guess that’s only a small thing, but is still something the music industry has never considered before, at least, to my knowledge.

The FT says that Nokia’s “comes with music” devices are due “in the second half of this year”, so if Apple truly is considering a subscription model, they clearly want to stave off the serious competitive threat that Nokia is to their business, despite the fact Apple has struck back with the iPhone.

Nokia still sells billions more devices than Apple every year, and while Nokia still has a long way to go before being able to replicate the iPhone interface, Nokia’s phones are still very advanced and popular worldwide – and not everyone is affected by the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field concerning all things Apple.

If anyone could truly make the subscription model for music a success overnight, it would be Apple, the iPod and iTunes.

Quite how much of any monthly subscription fee actually ends up in the hands of the original artists is yet to be seen – with artists perhaps preferring, in the future, to deal with Apple and iTunes direct, bypassing the music labels altogether, as some artists have done, including Madonna.

Is a music subscription service a ‘one more thing’ that has accidentally become public, or is Apple raising a flag to see just how much interest there truly is?

I guess we’ll just have to wait to hear it from the mouth of Steve Jobs to truly find out!