Free downloads with your iPod? Cool idea
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Your adjacent iPod may come up with a particular treat: All the music you can legally download, for free.
Apparently, Apple have been kicking around the thought of offering free entree to its iTunes library to clients who pass more than upfront for an iPod or iPhone for about a year. This week, the rumour exploded all over the news, suggesting that the company might be taking the thought more seriously than it's willing to allow on. It would be a major strategical electric switch for Apple, which have rejected subscription services in the past. But even if the company opts to seek this option, it's far from clear that Apple could acquire away with it.
Not because of the usual suspects, either: the major music labels have got long pushed for Apple to offer a subscription service to iTunes, the country's second-largest music retailer. (Subscription services are steady gross streams, unlike 99-cent one-hit wonders, and the strangled music industry is despairing for steady gross watercourses right now.) There's a little but important alkali of consumers, too, who would be thrilled at the chance to fill up up for an other fee, even if it's a big one. This scheme could also offer the iPod a nice encouragement at a clip when gross sales have got fallen flat.
No, the large ground Apple probably won't be able to draw this deed off is a simpler one: its competitors. At the minute there are still a few courageous companies willing to be in competition with iTunes, and some of them, like eMusic, sell downloading subscription services. But the iPod claims about 85 percentage of the MP3 participant marketplace - packaging it together with iTunes sounds a spot like bundling. That agency long, expensive antimonopoly lawsuits that Apple could be hard-pressed to win.
For now, Apple is keeping mum. But our intuition is that music fans shouldn't salvage their appetencies for an iTunes buffet.
Labels: antitrust lawsuits, extra fee, largest music, major music, mp3 download, mp3 player market, music labels, music retailer, one hit wonders, reason apple, revenue streams

