Les Ottolenghi, CEO of Intent MediaWorks, claimed last week that Apple will launch a music subscription service within the next six months, which would constitute a reversal of everything Steve Jobs has ever said on the topic (the Apple party line was that people want to subscribe to video and purchase audio). Intent MediaWorks distributes content via P2P networks, so it's possible that Apple is considering using that technology to distribute subscription tracks using some sort of P2P, bandwidth-saving technology.
If Ottolenghi and others who have floated this rumor are right about Apple having subscription plans, the company would probably have to release a new iPod for dealing with subscription tracks. When Microsoft launched the music subscription technology that underpins Rhapsody, Napster, MTV Urge, Yahoo Unlimited, and the rest, their team told me that the key to allowing subscription tracks on a portable device is a secure hardware clock inside those devices that cannot be tampered with. Otherwise, someone could create a hack that would allow you to pay for a single day of a subscription, and then fool the device into thinking that it was always that same day, so that the tracks would continue to play.
Unless Apple has been secretly embedding similar clocks in iPods inanticipation of a subscription, or has developed some other tamper-proof solution, Jobs won't be able to offer musicsubscriptions to users of existing iPods without facing resistance fromthe record labels, who are understandably cautious about letting peopledownload upwards of 2 million tracks for $15 bucks without abulletproof mechanism for expiring these tracks when the subscription isterminated.
Of course, Apple does have a new music player on thehorizon: the iPhone. Since the iPhone can connect to Apple serversover Cingular's wireless network, it's possible that Apple could enablemusic subscriptions on the iPhone without needing to incorporate a hardware clock into the device. Jobs haschanged his mind before; Apple released the iPod Shuffle just a few monthsafter he deriding the idea of flash-based MP3 players. We could be infor another about-face, this time involving iTunes music subscriptions. If that happens, I suspect the tracks play will play on connected computers and the iPhone, but not on today's unconnected iPods.
(image from gizmodo.uk)
