Monday, December 31, 2007

Movie Rentals Coming to iTunes - What About Music?

As rumored for a while (and previously mentioned) Fox and Disney will both be offering movie rentals via iTunes (for between $2 - $5 for a 24 hour period). So, Apple's FairPlay DRM scheme - and complete hardware line - has now obviously evolved to support time-constrained subscription licenses.

As the music world continues to move to a DRMless ecosystem - with Warner now the 3rd of the 4 major labels to join - one must wonder if Apple is considering entering the subscription music market.

Why?! Well, in a DRM world iTunes became the dominant player partly because the only place you could buy major-label music that worked on an iPod was from iTunes. But now.... now I can unprotected MP3s from multiple sources that work with my iPod. Amazon being the most notable.

So, if Amazon all of a sudden started eating into iTunes sales.... would Apple flick the switch on subscription music to lock them (the consumers) back in? I don't know, but at this point one of the few people that could get people to "rent" their music is the same person that told people not to in the first place.

I still need to post my 2008 predictions... maybe this will be one of my long-shot picks.

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