Subscription music available to 8 million users of iTunes

18th July, 2010 by adina
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About eight million users of iTunes would be eager to pay for an iTunes streaming service, according to the NPD Group. As estimated, between seven and eight million users are strongly interested to pay $10 or even more per month for a music streaming service in general or, as an alternative, to get remote access to iTunes collections already existing across many devices. In the case of free access to existing collections, between 13 million and 15 million users would use the service, according to researchers.

Any of the services would scale quickly as more or better devices connected to Internet would be available to customers, among them iPads or iPhones. The services are believed to generate important revenue even in a short time. If all those interested users would pay $10 for a monthly service, Apple would get about $1 billion during the first twelve months, which would mean two thirds of what it gets now from the pay-per-track model.

NPD’s predictions are based on a polling of 3,862 users of iTunes but would not be mandatory to extrapolate in practice and determine Apple to adopt such a business model. According to rumors, Apple may instigate a push for many iTunes services towards the cloud. This would include, besides traditional subscription streams, device-to-device sharing as well as TV show rentals for 99 cents, which would never need to be locally stored.

The creation of a large data center in North Carolina has indicated large ambitions than in the past, although Apple has never put its plans in discussion. Streaming subscriptions are not new as they have been tried by Rhapsody or others, usually unsuccessful, but, because smartphones and tablets are now constantly connected to the Internet and at the same time have little storage, it is important that music is always available. Google will permit remote access through its Android phones and will possibly have its own streaming paid music service.


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