Kevin Maney is a longtime business and technology columnist and the author of Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't. I recently talked with him about the future of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes and got his thoughts on some provocative comments by Prince.
Mac Greer: Let's begin by talking Prince. In an interview with the Daily Mirror, a British newspaper, Prince said that the Internet was "completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else." He also went on, Kevin, to compare the Internet to MTV, suggesting that it was almost a passing fad. What do you make of Prince's comments?
Kevin Maney: Well, the idea of comparing MTV to the Internet broadly is so crazy. MTV may be like iTunes, but the Internet is like TV. It is a fundamental shift in the way media and entertainment [get] distributed to the public and the way people experience it. All of us know that Prince's comments were crazy. You Google "Prince and Internet" and there's like 30,000 references to his comments, all of them belittling him for saying it. It is just somebody who appears to be fairly out of touch. I do understand that if he is all about the money, he's saying the iTunes folks aren't going to give him an advance on his record like he used to get. The era of getting these gigantic advances for an album he is about to cut, that is just history, and he had better get used to it.
Greer: And what do you see as the single biggest competitive threat to iTunes?
Maney: The biggest threat is going to be subscriptions. Increasingly, all of us have more and more devices. Now we have got an iPad. We've got an iPhone. We've got an iPod. And we have got laptops. And we want to stream music to our home stereo systems. The idea of keeping all those synced with music that we have on a hard drive somewhere is getting increasingly nuts. At the same time, more and more, there is Wi-Fi everywhere, and of course there are 3G cell connections most everywhere, if you have Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and not AT&T (NYSE: T), I guess.
So the idea of having all this music that you "own" and stick on a hard drive somewhere just doesn't make any sense anymore. What really does make sense is to have music in the cloud somewhere where you can access it anytime over any network on any device. Having Rhapsody is one kind of subscription service where you pay a certain monthly fee and you have access to any of the music that is on the system at any time. Others are more likely to take the music that you own and you upload it to the cloud so that you can access it from a cloud anywhere. And iTunes will probably try these various things and eventually move toward some kind of version of this kind of stuff.
