Lots of companies are working hard to sell music, thinking that they are competing with Apple. In fact, they are simply playing into Apple’s hand, according to the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

That’s because, as followers of Apple have known all along, Apple make just a little money on selling music, but makes big bucks selling iPod hardware.

"ITunes was developed to promote iPod hardware sales," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst at research firm IDC. "The introduction of services that offer digital music to the installed base of iPod users will help drive more iPod sales."

The important effect comes from music vendors realizing that they can’t be successful if they sell music in odd formats or subscription services that don’t work with the Apple iPod. As they slowly move to unprotected MP3s that will play on the iPod, Apple simply makes more iPods to meet demand.

"Certainly the ability to buy music in more places helps Apple," Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield said. "They make very little money on iTunes transactions, and they make a good amount of money on iPod transactions."

While the new venture between MTV, RealNetworks, and Verizon seems to provide more coherence, the real agenda is not to help Apple’s iPod, but rather to sell music to Verizon phone customers. "By putting these services together, they have a stronger service," said analyst Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. However, he also noted that songs sold through the Rhapsody America subscription service don’t work on the iPod.

Apple’s business model seems exceptionally well thought out. Whenever a company or a group of companies tries to roll their own competition to iTunes + iPod, it entails some critical weakness in the business model or technology that forces the venture to remain isolated and at low volume compared to Apple’s business.

All these music services also contribute to confusion in the market place, according top David Card, an online music analyst at Jupiter Research. The result, he thinks, will be customers defaulting to the simplest services: unprotected MP3s on the Apple iPod.