The Rumor Room: iTunes Unlimited

You'd pass this offer up??? If you had itunes unlimited i'm sure you'd be paying month by month anyway. If you think about it, it costs on average $13 a cd from the store. If you buy a subscription your paying that cost once a month to listen to whatever you want. Also there are 3rd party software to remove the drm from those albums i'm pretty sure. So get over yourselves!!! it would be a great thing.

Wow people, why so much hostility to the idea? We're not talking iTunes ONLY offering subscriptions - it's an additional service for those of us who want it.

If you only listen to top 40 radio or a handful of artists, a subscription service is probably not for you - you'd probably be better off just buying tracks on iTunes. But for people with truly eclectic taste, the price is entirely worth it. And who cares if you don't own the music? You pay far more for cable in a given month, and you don't own any of that content either.

Frankly, the lack of subscription functionality is what made me ditch my i-pod and is now the only thing keeping me from buying an iPhone. Just offer the option, Apple - people will leave Rhapsody in droves.

I don't see the big deal here. If they offered subscription OR the ability for the existing model to continue being offered, that would give the customer the choice. A virtually limitless library is appealing to a great deal of people who have greater diversity in music taste and a desire to hear new music does not meet their budget. Jobs likes the pay-per-song model because it is a benefit to the market since most of our iPod libraries are confined within a storage device. Once wireless technology is ubiquitous enough for music to stream vast libraries (read everyone+iPhone/iPod Touch), I think you'll see Jobs cozy up a bit more to the idea of offering a hybrid model of iTunes Services.

Clearly there is a demand for such a service, and if you think Jobs is just going to refuse to fold on principle, then why is iPod dual-platform? Why does Boot Camp exist? Why is Safari available for Windows? A subscription based model may happen, it may not happen. But don't kid yourself. If he thought it was possible and that he could make more money off of it, he would do it. That's not wrong. It's smart.

Besides, how great does having everything in iTunes sound if you bought the 8GB iPhone? It sounds pretty bad-ass to me.

for people that don't want ot steal music and dont have $10.00 everytime an album comes out or even for the millions of under 18ers out there this is perfect! 100 some odd bucks gets you unlimited iTunes music and the music that you wanna keep you can do so or if you wanna get rid of it after it gets played out...

does anyone understand where I'm coming from?

If it’s going to be true, they better get rid of DRM. Like Amazon.

I love this. $130 a year for unlimited downloads is fantastic. i don't mind if it's only renting, i'd stop downloading illegaly if this became a reality.

Erica: love your stuff but I have one favor to ask...please, please never use the construction "that being said" ever again. It is ugly, passive and surely one more sign of the apocalypse.

While I can understand that most people commenting do not want to see this service, I think a good majority of users would like to see this. Remember that the price in the article (~$130) is per YEAR, not MONTH. Most of you were complaining that this is per month. READ the article before you start complaining. :P If you listen to Pandora/Last.fm/etc. you probably listen to a lot of music, and you're like me. But what happens when you aren't near WiFi or your computer and you want to listen to a certain genre or era of music? Maybe a specific tag collection? Well with this service you could have that. (Something I'd like to see in iTunes is the ability to "tag" your music). You could quickly download a few tracks (if they have over the air worked out with the "cloud") and be on your way to listening.

I saw a few people complain about storage for the iPhone/iPod touch. Give me a break. When do you really have time to listen to more than 16 or 32GB worth of music/video? Most people use their devices to/from class/work, or on trips. Most trips people go on nowadays have their laptops with them. This would give you the option to switch out your music. However, if the "cloud" is working, I don't see why you couldn't select playlists to sync up with on the cloud and have everything else be deleted from the device.

There's many ideas that I'd like to see happen, as most of you would like to see happen. Every time Apple is getting ready for an announcement, we all tend to get over excited and have "brainbuster" ideas. We need to just take a step back and realize that some of these things just aren't going to happen right away due to technological constraints i.e. more memory in iPhone/iPod touches (due to battery life). I remember reading an article about 3rd Quarter financial results and I saw something in there about Apple making products/services less profitable for them, so that the consumer benefits. I see this happening and am excited to see what they have in store this September.

I highly doubt this is true, only because I don't think that record companies would give it the "okay" when they are already making tons off the $0.99 system currently in place.

This would be pretty cool but my guess is that if this sort of thing was released, you would have to pay a $99 renewal fee per year (after the initial $129.99 fee) otherwise the music would be removed from the computer. So it would basically be like renting the songs...for a year or more...which would be okay because most of the time you only listen to a song for a few months and then rarely after that. (unless it's really good of course)

Do not want.