Apple To Do Subscription Service?

Michael Gartenberg | March 19, 2008, 08:29 AM

Rumors of Apple doing a subscription music service are as old as... well as old as the iPod itself. But a new report from the Financial Times suggests that Apple will be doing exactly that. It appears there are two models under discussion, a traditional rental service with a monthly fee and a model tied to the life of a specific device with a single up-front payment (similar to Nokia's Comes With Music).

I won't speculate whether the rumor is correct or not but I can say that it does make sense. First, with the latest changes to the Fair Play DRM to support movie rentals, the technology now would also be able to support a subscription service as well. Second, if Apple does this, the one thing I'm sure they will do is take the time to market this beyond the hard core music lover and explain the value proposition of how a subscription service can co-exist with music that you own and that the two are not mutually exclusive. Add in the fact that any service would work in the whole eco-system of iTunes supported devices (and perhaps with a future 3G iPhone) and the proposition looks very good for something like this to succeed where others have struggled.