Steve Jobs Nixes Subscription Music Idea (Again)

Steve Jobs never liked the idea of subscription-based music. He feels that consumers would rather buy instead of “rent” their tunes. Even if you get access to two million songs a month, you have to keep paying a monthly fee, or else all the songs stop working.

(This is the idea behind MP3 players such as the Yahoo-powered Sansa Connect.)

At any rate, Steve Jobs reiterated his position in a Reuters interview published today, putting recent rumors to rest (for now, at least).

We’re just hoping that he can convince the other music labels to drop digital rights management from their music catalogs. As we’ve said numerous times on this blog, the mobile media revolution will go nowhere if you have to buy a song once for your iPod and again for your cell phone; that’s insane. Subscription-based services are fine–we’ll take ‘em or leave ‘em, really–but DRM is the real problem, not the lack of a rent-a-music offering.

Jobs: Apple customers not into renting music [Reuters via CNN]

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