I find it very hard to believe that the music industry would even consider allowing Apple to bundle into the price of an iPod unlimited music downloads for the life of the iPod. If they do pull this off though, the price of an iPod will go way up.
While it appears a lot of people buy music for their iPods I know that the three iPods we have here at our home have less than $150.00 word of iTunes purchased music on them. The single Zune my daughter uses is full of music she is able to download via the Zune Marketplace subscription.
Being I am older I have stacks of CD’s I burned to MP3 years ago, and that is my primary library. My kids are the only ones consuming new music. although the few tracks I have purchased were to complete music libraries I did not have already.
But if Apple gets the music industry to buy into this they will forever change the music industries business model. Arstechnica