Apple has never been a fan of subscription based music services, but iPhone users may soon have the ability to enjoy a subscription experience should Apple approve a recently submitted Rhapsody app to the iTunes App Store.
You might recall that Rhapsody, in its current incarnation, allows users to stream an endless amount of music for $15/month. According to Rhapsody, users who already subscribe to the service will be allowed to download the streaming app for free. One potential glitch, though, is that the service will only operate with a constant 3G or Wi-Fi Internet connection. If the Rhapsody app is accepted into iTunes, though, Rhapdody will most likely introduce an offline mode in future iterations of the software.
Interestingly, Wired writes that “another concession Rhapsody has made to Apple is that if a user decides to buy a track while streaming it, the “buy” links go to iTunes’ AAC store, rather than to Rhapsody’s MP3 store.”
Clearly, Rhapsody duplicates functionality already inherent in iTunes, but hey, so does Pandora. Our guess is that Rhapsody will make its way onto iTunes scratch-free, if only because of all the bad press Apple has been receiving in the wake of its decision to reject, uh, I mean remove, Google Voice from the app store.
And besides, iTunes was used a means to push iPods out the door, not iPhones. To that end, Apple relies heavily on its app store, and it’s in Apple’s interest to keep its app store as competitive as possible, duplicative functionality be damned.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
My take is that it is very premature to believe that Apple should accept this application. There are many things that Real could have done which would have been clear violations of the guidelines that Apple has laid out. Violating any of them should, in all fairness, get Real a request that they compile.
With the Application Store, Apple is both the publisher and the retailer of the application. In that role it has a number of clear responsibilities that appear to be overlooked by most of the critics of the store. Many of whom scream “foul” whenever the store does not work the way that they think it should without considering either the legal or business reasons that it works the way it does.
Disclaimer: These words are my opinion and although I use Macintosh computers every day, I do not own either an iPod or an iPhone. – ss