> The only problem is that Apple is using its huge market share in portable players to keep subscription music from getting a foothold. Spotify's iphone app is approved, so hopefully they can start to crack this market open.
It also doesn't help that people don't want to lose access to their music if they all of the sudden can't come up with the $15/month... I would say that people are probably more willing to give up cable/satellite tv for a month than deal with losing their music.
Problems with the subscription model:
* Need a portable music player that supports the particular DRM
scheme vs just getting an MP3 that plays on almost any
portable music player (save for Sony's players that only play
their ATRAC crap).
* Don't make a monthly payment and you lose all access to your
collection/playlists/etc.
* The service could implode. Then you've sunk $15/month * x
months and you have nothing to show for it.
* The DRM scheme could become unsupported. Microsoft has
proven this with their abandonment of PlaysForSure.
You are living in the past on several of these issues. For one, Sony's players have supported mp3 for at least the past 3 years and possibly longer. Second, options like Microsoft's Zune Pass let you do both: paying $15/month gets you access to the entire catalog of music, but you get to keep 10 of the tracks (in a no DRM, quality mp3 format for most songs) every month -- making it equivalent to only paying around $6/month for the subscription.
> For one, Sony's players have supported mp3 for at least the past 3 years and possibly longer.
Last time I checked they said that players 'supported mp3', but what that really meant is that you had to use their software to load music onto the player, and their software transcoded from mp3 -> ATRAC. They just don't announce it outright that internally the player is using ATRAC.
> Second, options like Microsoft's Zune Pass let you do both: paying $15/month gets you access to the entire catalog of music, but you get to keep 10 of the tracks (in a no DRM, quality mp3 format for most songs) every month -- making it equivalent to only paying around $6/month for the subscription.
In that case, it's not really a 'subscription service' but a hybrid 'subscription/pay-to-own service.' More like a 'rent-to-own' service. {edit} Not to mention that Zune is Windows-only. {/edit}
The nice thing about subscription service is that you're never in danger of losing your music. You're not locked into a specific codec, audio quality, or player.
If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
I'm not claiming that it's perfect for everyone, it's a personal choice: you can get all of the music now but have to keep paying, or you can slowly build up a library but start out with not much.
The other advantage of subscription is that you can easily try out new music. It's incredibly easy to discover new music when it's all in one catalog and there's no marginal cost of listening to entire CDs.
The only problem is that switching from one model to the other is going to be painful--but this isn't an advantage either way.
> You're not locked into a specific codec, audio quality, or player.
You're not locked into a specific player with mp3 audio either, and IIRC there aren't any subscription services that give you mp3 audio... so you are limited in your choices of music player in the first place since subscription services all use some form of DRM.
If you buy CD audio, or are able to find a service that sells FLAC/APE/ALAC audio, then you're also not 'locked in' to a particular codec or audio quality (because at that level you can easily transcode downwards in quality and/or to lossy codecs).
> If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
This is assuming that the subscription services use compatible DRM schemes, or that your player supports both DRM schemes... Otherwise you're stuck needing to buy a new player. And that's not to mention any time and effort that you put into building custom playlists that won't transfer to the new subscription service.
It's sort of like all the personal information that people put into Facebook. They are investing a lot of time into one vendor of social networking services. The more time that they spend on Facebook, the more heavily invested they are in staying with that particular vendor, because it becomes more and more painful to rebuild all of your information/connections/etc on the new service.
It also doesn't help that people don't want to lose access to their music if they all of the sudden can't come up with the $15/month... I would say that people are probably more willing to give up cable/satellite tv for a month than deal with losing their music.
Problems with the subscription model: