The eternal battle between pay-per-download and subscription services is ongoing—well, that is, if you believe what BusinessWeek has to say. In an article from Peter Burrows, the BW says that the subscription’s day in the sun could be coming! Soon! Annnnyyy minute now.
Now, changing consumer behavior is giving subscription advocates new hope. Members of the Facebook Generation are bombarded with music recommendations every day, and don’t necessarily want to pay a buck to check each one out.Sure, that’s totally true. Unfortunately for subscription music plans, they don’t usually want to pay $10-$15 a month for them either.
“If I can access whatever I want whenever I want,” says Ted Cohen, who led EMI’s digital music efforts and now runs an entertainment consultancy called TAG Strategic, “why do I need to own it?”Well, there’s the rub you see. Because you can’t access whatever you want whenever you want without owning it. I can’t play my subscription-based tunes on my iPod, and if I decide I don’t want to keep giving money to the record companies, well, forever, then I lose all of my music.
Apple’s (AAPL) music store has been so successful that it’s easy to overlook how little it has changed amid a shifting marketplace. Four years after its launch, the iTunes Music Store remains an old-school e-tailer. Yes, it offers “listeners also bought” recommendations and “iMixes” from other customers. But even if visitors find a new artist on iTunes, they get only a 30-second sample before buying. So while Apple excels at selling mainstream music, it’s not so good at introducing people to fresh sounds.Well, unless you count the copious tracks given away for free every week. Some might also argue that the store’s stability is part of its success, since you don’t have to wake up every day and guess what the rules might be today.
That’s what many music fans seem to want. Millions of millennials are logging onto social networks like imeem and iLike, which allow visitors to discover new music and recommend it to their friends. Millions more are flocking to online radio stations such as Pandora Radio, where you can create your own personalized stations.Yes, but again imeem, iLike, and Pandora are all free. And if people are happy with those services, why do you think they’d suddenly start paying for the privilege? I don’t think they’ll do it just to get a warm, fuzzy feeling for helping out the record companies.
To be fair, Burrows raises many of these points further on in his article. He goes on to discuss the plans many of the music companies have made to combat iTunes’s success, like Universal’s Total(ly Doomed to Failure) Music plan of adding the cost of music to the price of players and phones and Rhapsody, Real, and MTV’s Voltron-like team-up.
Despite all of my mocking and ribbing, I don’t think subscription services are necessarily a bad idea—it’s true that not everybody wants to own their music, and I long ago pleaded for an iTunes video subscription service. But I also don’t think any of these companies are going to be the ones to pull it off. I mean, come on: Universal chief Doug Morris recently fessed up that they don’t really understand technology. But, strangely enough, I don’t think they get music either. They get fleecing, sure, but I think that particular train is quickly running out of track.
No subscription service has been successful so far but is that because the business model per se is wrong?
Roughly 80% of the music players out there in the hands of users cannot be used with a subscription service because those players cannot use the Microsoft DRM the songs are encoded with.
If that 80% could play along then maybe there is something there.
When are these companies going to learn that people want to own their music?
If you want to rent music, go to the library.
I like the idea that iTunes is old school. The new wave that the kids will buy into is subscription. Never mind that subscriptions services predated iTunes.
I may have taken points away for the Bill and Ted reference in your Gadgetbox story, Dan; but you get points for Voltron. You'd get double for a more appropriate Dracotron reference.