Apple iTunes streaming music rental service talk surfaces again, just won’t die

It’s not an over-generalization to say that Apple is the only significantly successful company in the history of digital music, and the rest are all either niches or failures. It’s also plain fact that Apple is the one to use a “you pay for it, you own it” music store model, while the failing/failed efforts have centered around some kind of music rental/streaming/subscription/cloud which no one outside the geekdom has any interest in or ever will. But because technology headlines are written by geeks, the “Apple is minutes away from launching a music rental service” headlines persist to this day.

The latest is from the NY Post, which claims that Apple is meeting with record labels as we speak to launch such a music rental service. These same rumors are floated by headline-writing geeks pretty much every time Apple is about to make a product announcement of any kind, and indeed even when Apple doesn’t have any press events on the horizon. Nevermind that there are no mainstream music rental services, because every company that tries such a model goes out of business; the geeks want Apple to launch one anyway. Nevermind that the only reason Apple acquired failed music streaming service Lala last year was because Lala approached Apple about a chump-change buyout, and Apple saw it as an easy way of hiring some digital music engineers; the geeks insisted that Apple bought failed Lala so it could launch its own failed music rental service.

Plenty of aspects of digital commerce are still open to debate as to which models will work and which ones won’t. However, digital music is not one of them. History has shown that the mainstream wants to own its music if it’s going to pay money for music at all, and that the public has no appetite or trust for pay-for music rental services. If anything, streaming music services like Pandora have been moderately successful because they’re free; it could be argued that the only reason MySpace still has any relevance in music (even after losing relevance as a social network) is that it offers free full-song streaming from major artists. But the fact that these services have to be free just to be popular is also the reason why they go out of business.

That still hasn’t stopped geek after geek from positing that because Apple is so popular right now, it and it alone could get away with launching a music rental service. Of course, the geeks’ argument here is essentially that even though music rentals are a concept that will never, ever be accepted by anyone but geeks, Apple should launch one anyway. Just for the geeks’ sake. Even though no one else would want it. Even though it would lose money. Even though those among the mainstream who did try it out, just because it was from Apple, would hate it and feel cheated once their music went poof after they stopped paying the monthly fee.

The seven year long saga in which geeks have begged for an iTunes music rental service and/or demanded one, while falsely claiming that one was coming in the hopes of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, is eerily similar to the first seven years of the iMac era. While the public had no trouble accepting the iMac’s all-in-one design, geeks spent years having a collective meltdown over the fact that the monitor was built into the computer, and spent those same seven years embarrassing themselves by begging for (and falsely claiming the impending existence of) a headless iMac. Finally, Apple gave them what they’d been screaming for, just to shut them up and silence the needless bad press which was coming from “Mac geeks” who just couldn’t control themselves. And to the surprise of absolutely no one but the geeks, the “headless iMac” known as the Mac mini has been a poor seller which has had no effect on the market other than to confuse mainstream users.

It’s possible that, even with Apple having proven that music sales are the present and future of digital music, and even with the music rental model having been proven to be an abject failure, Apple might throw the geeks a bone – again – just to shut them up. Such a service would go absolutely nowhere in terms of mainstream success, but that’s never been relevant to the geeks, who have long wanted Apple to forsake needs and desires the other 99% of users for the sake of catering to them and solely them. After all, it’s the way in which nearly every other “consumer” technology company does business.