Over at the Guardian, music retailer eMusic has weighed in on those rumors about Apple bundling iPods with free iTunes access. It would be "anti-competitive behavio(u)r by a monopolist," the Guardian quotes David Pakman, eMusic's CEO.
The plan, which not a lot of people seem to believe is entirely real, would be to sell iPods and iPhones with a set "free music" premium charge that would allow unrestricted access to music over the lifetime of the device. The likely cost would be about $100/device, working out to about $5/month over 18 months. This plan would make music labels "dangerously dependent" (again, according to the Guardian article) on Apple.
I'm not sure I follow Pakman's reasoning. The Universal Total Music idea has been around for a while and was originally proposed for non-Apple platforms. If Total Music does pan out for the iPod/iPhone, it seems that it would be Universal Music (or a reasonable music industry facsimile) being anticompetitive not Apple.
Thanks, Sebastian Clarke.
I don't know about you, but I just can't get enough iPhone related news! The latest company trying to hitch their wagon to the iPhone star is eMusic. eMusic, you might know, is an online purveyor of digital music downloads (they are the second biggest, right behind iTunes) but the cool thing about eMusic is that they sell MP3s sans DRM. Their whole catalog is DRM free, which means they have a smaller catalog than iTunes but you can play it on any device you own (and even some you don't).
eMusic 
