Banding around the internet is a revival of the long standing rumour that Apple will be releasing a subscription based music service for its iTunes Store. The specific iteration rumoured this time would be called ‘iTunes Unlimited’, this comes from several Apple rumour sites, including TUAW, who were tipped by anonymous email recently.

The insider suggests that for $129.99 (or $99 with a current MobileMe subscription) customers would ”buy unlimited music access for one year”, allowing you to play it on your computer or iPod/iPhone. But, does this allow you to keep the music you’ve purchased with the subscription service (bearing in mind you’ve already put it in your iPod)? Apparently not, but this isn’t too clear. Apparently the option to “buy and keep” would “replace the subscription version of a song with a downloaded version” and both the subscription and full download version of the song would be encoded with at least 256 Kbps- this starts to sound slightly like iTunes movie rentals. So, surely, if Apple did it with movies… they’d do it with music, right? Probably wrong.

Whenever I see rumours like this, I instantly remember the infamous video of the MacWorld 2003 launch of the iTunes Store. Steve Jobs absolutely slated subscription music services saying

“These services treat you like a thief….. we think subscriptions are the wrong path…. people have bought their music for as long as we can remember…. people want to buy their music on the internet by buying downloads just like they bought LPs, just like they bought cassettes and just like they bought CDs.”

And indeed, almost every profitable online music service today favours a buy and keep system rather than a subscription system. However, times have changed, especially in the world of online music. Despite it only being released 5 years ago, the iTunes Store has catapulted from its inception to worldwide dominance. The question is: has Steve Jobs changed?