iTunes eyeing subscriptions?

The subject of iTunes subscriptions seems to pop up every few months, but Apple has always rejected the idea of offering its customers subscription plans, preferring to stick to purely digital downloads. The latest rumor of iTunes offering its customers access to its catalog for a monthly fee comes from Les Ottolenghi, CEO of INTENTMediaWorks, a digital distribution system that works with peer-to-peer networks. Ottolenghi wrote a column last week in which he claimed to have had recent meetings with people from Apple, and he believes the company will announce a subscription service for iTunes within the next six months.

Major record labels have long supported the concept of subscriptions, since the monthly fees would provide a dependable, regularly occurring revenue stream. For subscription services like Napster and Rhapsody, customers pay a monthly fee for unlimited rentals of music. The major labels are expected to try and convince Apple to add subscriptions as part of their negotiations to renew their agreements with the iPod/iTunes giant.

AnywhereCD yanks MP3 option

Michael Robertson, founder of the original MP3.com, continues to try and push the envelope in the digital music space and continues to be stifled by the major record labels. Last week, Robertson launched AnywhereCD.com, a music retailer that sought to sell both CDs and MP3 downloads. The site sells CDs at regular price--the Shins' Wincing the Night Away costs $14.95 on the site--but was also giving buyers immediate access to MP3 versions of the purchased music in their own MP3tunes locker as they waited for the CD to arrive in the mail. AnywhereCD also gave users the option of saving a few dollars by just buying MP3 downloads of the album.

Warner Music Group objected to the latter option, demanding that the site remove the MP3 download option, despite the fact that users could simply rip the CD into MP3 files once it arrived in the mail. The label said AnywhereCD could not sell Warner Music's catalog in MP3 format because it had not acquired a license to do so. AnywhereCD has since dropped the MP3-only option, but it continues to sell CDs and give its users access to the MP3 version of the purchased music.

IODA, Last.fm ink deal

Music discovery site Last.fm continued to add to its ever-growing music catalog today with a licensing deal with San Francisco-based digital distribution giant Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA). The agreement adds IODA's catalog of 800,000 tracks into Last.fm's customizable, radio-based recommendation service, while 24,000 tracks will be available as on-demand streams and downloads. Last.fm tweaks the music-discovery tools of sites like Pandora by adding a social networking element, allowing music fans to connect and recommend music to one another. IODA's catalog includes the likes of Fall Out Boy, MF Doom, Bebel Gilberto, Willie Nelson, Billie Holliday, They Might Be Giants, Fela Kuti, Master P, and Seu Jorge.

"Music discovery is quickly becoming an essential commercial area for the new music industry," Last.fm cofounder Martin Stiksel said in a statement. "This latest partnership with IODA gives the Last.fm community full access to more than 3 million music tracks on the streaming radio player." The IODA deal follows similar recent agreements with Warner Music Group and EMI.

Russia cracks down on media pirates

Faced with growing international pressure to stamp out music and movie piracy, Russia is getting a bigger stick with which to enforce its anti-piracy laws. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed off on amendments to Russia's criminal code that add a year to the maximum sentences that producers of pirated movies, music, and other intellectual property would face and double maximum fines to $20,000.

Amnesties that have often allowed known pirates to slip through the net will no longer apply, and the statute of limitations for chasing down pirate producers is increased to 10 years under the amendments to Article 146 of the Russian criminal code. The government is pushing piracy up the list of police priorities. In the past, intellectual property crimes were not reported in a separate category, meaning police often paid less attention to them than more traditional serious crimes such as car theft or assaults.