Well-known Smart Guy™ and head of Universal Music Doug Morris is apparently marshaling the troops (aka, other music labels) to defeat the evil iTunes. Is he advocating an expansion of the consumer-friendly trend towards DRM-free music? Nope. He’s trying to put together a new music store that offers subscription-based access to music that will not play on iPods.

This will fail for the following reasons:

1. It’s subscription based.
2. It won’t work with iPods.

No subscription model has worked yet in the music space (see Sony, Napster, and Microsoft’s attempts) and the iPod has a 70%+ share of the MP3 player market. So, failed business model plus incompatibility with everyone’s player equals…success? I guess it does to Doug Morris.

In the article I linked to above, Doug is quoted as saying (in reference to his original deal with Apple to place Universal’s content on the iTMS), “We got rolled like a bunch of puppies.” His definition of “rolled” is that he only gets 70% of the revenue each song generates, even though Universal has zero distribution costs. Personally, if getting 70% of anything involving the sale of over 3 billion things makes me a puppy, I’d be happy to chew a few slippers and get my tummy scratched.