Music services will not profit from SDK

With the announcement of SDK there are plenty of promise for games, corporate e-mail and other apps. Everything except for music! It seems there is little opportunity for advancing the enjoyment or acquisition of music with the iPhone.

“It’s an open question at this point how amenable Apple will be to offering products or applications that could conceivably interfere with its own iTunes revenue stream,” NPD Group’s Ross Rubin says.

Most likely, we will never see Naptser or Rhapsody on the iPhone, since they require DRM, which is not compatible with the iPhone. Music streaming services like Last.fm Pandora and imeem has no downloading capabilities outside of linking to such third-party services as iTunes.

“The real interesting test case will be Amazon,” Rubin says. “Here’s a music vendor selling songs that are clearly compatible with the iPhone. Unlike with Rhapsody or Napster, there’s no DRM you need to make work.”

The same goes for eMusic, since it is iTunes competitor however, Apple could easily decline their or similar applications in App Store.

Another stopping factor is that SDK does not add any access to iTunes libraries, which would allow plug-ins from applications like iLike, Last.fm, Qloud or OnTour, since it would expand iTunes functionality.

Of course one can utilise Safari browser, like SeeqPod did. Nevertheless, this is not the same as having a native iPhone app.

With iTunes having a music service in their tight hands, it will be interesting to see how this will pan out.

Thanks: Yahoo

Tags: app, Apple, application, apps, case, game, iPhone, OS, streaming

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