First-order effects

• MOG's independence ends either way: whether the rumored buyer is HTC or Beats, a standalone music subscription service becomes an accessory inside someone else's hardware or brand strategy.
• Spotify's rumored new round at roughly $3.5 billion — per multiple Silicon Valley investors cited in the reporting — sets the market price for streaming scale that MOG could no longer reach alone.

Second-order effects

• If a handset maker like HTC really is the buyer, phone vendors start bundling subscriptions with devices the way carriers bundle minutes, forcing rivals like Rdio to chase distribution deals of their own.
• A Beats acquisition would put a music subscription under the same roof as premium headphones, pushing streaming value toward whoever owns the listening hardware rather than the catalog license.

Third-order effects

• Standalone streaming services look structurally fragile at this point in 2012: access-based listening is consolidating around platform owners — device makers, brands, OS players — leaving few independents.
• The kill-or-save-the-music-industry debate over legal access models now turns on ownership: if subscriptions live inside hardware companies, labels negotiate with a handful of gatekeepers instead of a field of startups.