JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum How the Sony DRM Works

"From a customer's standpoint, it's rather disconcerting to see that you're just leasing your music. Especially if the service isn't as flexible as you want them to be such as my band's customer felt. Or, even worse, they decide to change their policies to something that's overly constraining. What would happen if Napster decided to raise their subscription fee to $999.99 per month? Most people would quit, and lose their music."

This is the problem. You were never "buying" the music in the first place. Do you REALLY think people think they are buying millions of songs for a 1 month subscription fee? Do people think that they now own movies they rent from Blockbuster or view on Cable TV?

The cost of music on a subscription service is microscopically small unless you are only listening to 1 CD worth of songs per month. If that is the case, then buying makes more sense. But if you are listening to a lot of music each month, the cost of buying versus a subscription is astronomically higher AND you don't get the freedom of selection or access to the variety that you are limited to by only getting the stuff you buy.

I think in the short term, most people will do both. They will subscribe to a service to listen casually to a huge variety of music, and then for the handful of albums or songs they really love, they buy a download copy and then burn it to CD or whatever else they want to do with it. I suggest signing up for one of the subscription services and really trying it out. It's addictive.

And the idea is that far more people will listen when it doesn't cost anything to do so when you're searching for new music. The first digital service that does a good job of filtering all the indie music so they can make quality recommdendations (from small niche genres to simply pointing out popular tracks) will really take full advantage of the potential. So far none of the services has paid much attention to half their music inventory that comes from CD Baby and other indies.

Brian