Warning: My Macbook is perched on a precipitous window ledge, ready to be pitched out into the backyard like a Frisbee if this turns out to be true.

Rip, Mix, Burn you say? The savior of the digital music revolution? Misunderstood benevolent dictator? Creator of the iPod and iTunes? Music subscription service? WTF?

c|net news is reporting that they’ve confirmed an article which appeared Tuesday in the London Financial Times which says that Apple Computer is in talks with the big record companies to develop a new music subscription service.

Are you kidding me?

This from the guy who’s been saying for years and said again at Macworld 2008:

“People don’t want to rent music, they want to own it.”

But now according to c|net:

“In years past, Apple CEO Steve Jobs argued that people want to download music and own it. Now CNET News.com has confirmed talks with the big music labels over a possible shift to subscriptions.”

The coverage from c|net has taken the angle of the legal side of this, where anti-trust lawyers are chomping at the bit to take on Apple if the company decided to pursue a music subscription service:

Apple is in for a fierce legal fight should it ever release a device that offers all-you-can-eat music, according to David Pakman, CEO of rival digital music service eMusic.

“It smells like classic Sherman Antitrust Act to me,” Pakman said. “I only know what I’ve read but the plan sounds very similar to the tying practices Microsoft used with Windows/Explorer. And Microsoft is still paying the penalties for that one.”

While this may not be a huge hot button issue for everyone, as a music fan I take this assault upon the very soul of what being a music fan is all about personal. I wrote a lengthy article here where I chastised and went toe-to-toe with a music industry executive over why music subscription services don’t make sense and are bad for consumers, while all along having faith in Apple’s iTunes model for distribution of content and the belief that Steve Jobs meant what he said about people wanting to own their music, and that that would be a guiding force for the future of how Apple and iTunes would proceed with respect to music content. I argued that the answer to revenue issues was the record companies opening up their entire libraries to iTunes so people could legally purchase more music, not less, and certainly not in a subscription model.

Part of this I would think has to be about slow iPod sales and market saturation, and a crumbling US economy where discretionary income for things like purchasing content such as music will likely become increasingly curtailed as things get worse – which they will.

But things like that never bothered Apple before. Apple always had this air of superiority, because they are, and a self-assured belief in that they knew what people wanted and they knew how to give it to them, and that people who knew better would buy their products anyway, despite whatever else was going on in the market.

“Recession? Bah. That don’t confront Steve Jobs …

I invented the iPod… Have you heard of it?”

< /third person mimic & sarcasm off >

Another part of this has to do with the record companies, especially the Universal Group, and the singular obsessive belief that they’ve all been fucked at the drive-thru by the MP3 and now they want some payback. Nothing short of a total and complete subscription model where they’ll rent you the same content over and over again will satisfy the appetite of these mega-corporations which really couldn’t care less about the music or the artists who make it. It’s all about the money.

Maybe I was a little naive in believing in the Cult of Steve. Maybe it was silly to believe that a guy who came of age in the counter-culture infancy of computers and rock and roll, who gave this speech at Stanford, who once waved the Rip|Mix|Burn flag in the face of the corporations who’ve been trying to tell us what to do with the music we purchase from them ever since the first record store opened its doors, wouldn’t someday become one of them. I guess I was wrong. This smells like nothing more than pure greed to me, and it makes me sad… because I’ve really become fond of that Macbook, and I think I like Fake Steve better now.

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