Jazz Odyssey

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CNNMoney.com has published the latest in a series of articles speculating that iTunes’ enormous marketshare in the digital music space is under siege due to:

1) Competing services forthcoming from Amazon and the MTV/Microsoft Urge partnership
2) All-in-one devices like cellphone/MP3 players that work with other music services
3) Apple’s refusal to embrace the subscription service model

Between all these market pressures and what’s going on with iTunes in France, it’s a wonder that Steve Jobs sleeps at night. (there is supposed to be a sarcasm HTML tag inserted here but your browser may not render it properly)

The truth of the matter is that the iPod/iTunes combo continues to be the simple, elegant solution that is attractive to most consumers. That isn’t to say that someone won’t build a better mousetrap, but even if it is a better mousetrap they’ll have a lot of catching up to do. As far as France goes, it’s a pretty good bet that Apple will fold the tent on the French iTunes store before opening up Fairplay. This wouldn’t be a tremendous blow to Apple on the surface as iPods are largely filled with content that didn’t come from iTunes anyway.