“In his 2008 Macworld trade show keynote, one of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s big announcements was that you’d now be able to rent movies as well as just download and buy them outright. He admitted that Apple had bet wrong in offering only sales of downloaded movies. This latest upgrade to Apple iTunes, version 7.6, makes the new rental service possible. But although the current version has a lot going for it, the store still lacks a music-subscription service,” Michael Muchmore and Rick Broida report for PC Magazine.
“A previous upgrade of iTunes, Version 7.4, added support for new iPods, addressed some serious security vulnerabilities and added closed captions, a rating system, and a larger window for viewing video on your computer. That version dovetailed with the release of the classic, the touch, and the third-generation nano. It also let iPhone owners create custom ringtones from songs bought on the iTunes Music Store (for a buck more per song). Version 7.5 added support for the iPhone in territories besides the U.S. and implemented several bug fixes,” Muchmore and Broida report.
“With the latest release, the big news is the introduction of movie rentals, but, disappointingly, music-subscription options like those offered by Napster, Rhapsody, and other Windows Media-based services are still nowhere to be found,” Muchmore and Broida report. “Music remains an à la carte, 99-cents-per-track proposition. For some reason Apple still wants to give this advantage to the Microsoft Zune.”
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps because music subscription services are vying with Microsoft’s Zune to see which can become the biggest failure? People consume music differently than they do TV shows and movies. We listen to songs over and over, but the number of movies that are watched repeatedly are few and far between. People want to own their music – it’s cheaper than paying for it every month for the rest of your life (depending on your life expectancy). Did Muchmore and Broida really write this B.S., or did greedy, old, give-me-money-for-doing-nothing Doug Morris sit in for a bit of ghostwriting? As we often say about music subscription services: Business models that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure. Criticizing Apple’s iTunes for not offering a failed business model taints this review.
Muchmore’s and Broida’s full review — once they figured out how to deauthorize their computer, of course — is here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Corinne” for the heads up.]