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Universal Music is looking to join forces with other major record labels to build a competitor to iTunes, according to a report in BusinessWeek. The company is in talks with Song BMG and Warner Music Group to launch a subscription music service called Total Music.
While the success of subscription music services like Napster and Yahoo Music has been minimal compared to the mass adoption of iTunes, Total Music would introduce an interesting new business model: free music. The theory is that with the promise of free music, consumers will buy many more devices from Apple's competitors, in turn offsetting the costs of the plan.
The price point for subscription music services is already pretty low – under $10/mo in most cases – so whether or not a free service would gain traction remains to be seen. The only way to guarantee mass adoption would be for the record labels to completely cut off iTunes, which they are not likely to do since the service makes up about 70% of all downloaded music.