Rent-a-tune: it's not gaining traction in the market, yet some observers still yearn for it

Coolfer (and many others) keep chiding Apple for abandoning a successful strategy in favor of a losing one.

says Glenn Coolfer:

Why wouldn’t Apple want to introduce a music subscription service? Maybe it’s for the same reasons the music industry is slow to move away from its CD-dominated business model: Fear in the uncertainty, fear of giving up its bread and butter. For a change, says the article, Apple will let somebody else innovate and then play follow-the-leader.

Let's consider the facts, then consider Apple's strategy:

* Apple has achieved market dominance with their current service
* No subscription service has had anything close to the traction of an own-by-song model
* the other competitive subscription services rely on Microsoft's DRM, an arguably inferior technology

Apple's strategy was based on customer research and market knowledge: music lovers want to own their music, a claim that Steve Jobs has repeated on the record many times. The entrenched culture of music ownership is not rental, and this culture is at least 80 years old (longer, if you consider that buying sheet music, not renting it, was the industry standard prior to the advent of the phonograph.) This is not a defensive strategy motivated by fear. It is a logical way to meet the market's expectations. There is no reason to want Apple to abandon the current ownership business model with iTunes, unless of course the market undergoes a large shift in behavior. And in that case, it's also perfectly logical for Apple to let someone else commit massive resources to fundamentally changing the market.

What the subscription model people continually avoid is the ultraslim margins involved--rental price points are severely undervalued and almost certainly will need to rise. Imagine this: you like the hundred or so songs you download and have to pay $240 per year for the next ten years just to keep listening to them--if the company you're renting them from goes under, you're screwed. You're locked into paying whatever the subscription is, even if it goes up, forever. It's a bad deal, and consumers recognize this.