Microsoft’s Music Subscription Killer

We mentioned Microsoft’s new DRM project Janus here before…News.com has more details on it and how the Microsoft copy-protection technology will finally arrive, bringing the all-you-can-eat subscription model to portable players.

Janus would add a hacker-resistant clock to portable music players for files encoded in Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media Audio format. That in turn would help let subscription services such as Napster put rented tracks on portable devices–something that’s not currently allowed.

The bottom-line: If fans of iPod-like devices can be convinced to drop the idea of owning song files, they could shift to paying a subscription fee for ongoing access to hundreds of thousands of tunes–something that would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars under the current dollar-per-download paradigm…

Wondering what RealNetworks’ Rhapsody or MusicMatch would think of this, since they also work on subscription model, but on the desktop…none of them are necessarily portable to portable music players…

Comments have been disabled for this post