Comments on: Apple reportedly mulling all-you-can-eat iTunes

If a report in the Financial Times is accurate, this marks a sharp strategy detour for Steve Jobs.

[sjkx]

Done right, a "subscription" package could be more cost-effective for listening to more music than you'd ever want or could afford to buy just to listen once or a couple times. And you could still purchase music for more frequent and unrestricted listening.

$100 for "unlimited" iTunes Store music access (skip the video, for now) would have more value to me than $100 of purchases with a significant percentage ending up collecting virtual dust.

[gerrrg]

A monthly subscription based upon tiered usage is a better business model than a flat fee for all-you-can-eat. All-you-can-eat will cause the price of songs on other sites to quickly sink to pennies per song to compete. At that point, you have to ask yourself, why not free music? I already get that with Slacker and Pandora.

[iBuzz]

Forget the monthly subscriptions. This model is better. You buy an iPod and then you get download access to all the songs in the iTunes Music Store for the life of your iPod. In a sense, you still own your music, and unless you lose your iPod or it breaks, no one can take your music away from you (unlike what happens when there is a glitch with subscription services and none of your music plays).

[Sac Tinko]

Monthly subscriptions for music will never work. If in 30 years I want to hear a song from my childhood, that I bought via subscription, what am I suppose to do, hope that the provider will still be around, so I can renew my subscription to hear the song? I want to own my music so I can listen to it now or in 5, 10, 15 years and I don't want to worry about losing that right if the record company goes bankrupt or if the service provider files Chapter 11.

[sjkx]

So, does a subscription service make it impossible for you to purchase what you want to own?

[inachu]

This is good as I don't know how many times I reinstall windows due to testing and such at home. I'd say I reinstall windows 4 to 6 times a year and I do not mind paying premium as I do not really care about saving music or other itunes data. This will save me lots of time and hard drive space in the long run.

[pjhenry1216]

You could always just partition your hard drive and put your music and other non-system data onto the second partition, thereby allowing it to be unaffected when you re-install windows. plus, i don't see how this saves you hard drive space other than you not always listening to the same music (download, reformat, forget to download it again). It wouldn't save you time cause you'd always be re-downloading. Partitioning would be your best bet. Just a tip.

[ryan.pollock]

A subscription music model would be huge for Apple. I'd gladly pay $15 / month to Apple for a subscription music service. (currently I pay Real this money)

In a way, their hand is being forced. We're entering a world where the iPhone will soon mean that you can listen to any song on demand through the internet. If Apple doesn't provide a subscription service, you can bet the Real will eat their lunch.

[sjkx]

Is it so hard to understand that multiple choices for consuming music can peacefully co-exist? Anyone who excludes someone's preferences by insisting theirs are the only valid ones seems selfishly arrogant. Discussions of how different choices can be better in certain situations is more useful and interesting than shallow claims of exclusive superiority.