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January 03, 2005
From the "Shoot Our Foot A Second Time" Department
An article (link thanks to MacMinute) on the News-Leader.com discussing why the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) use of the $0.99 USD per song is going away. I found this article completely bogus for multiple reasons, only a few are worth mentioning as they lead to a more interesting discussion.
To begin with, the article itself is very one sided; statements being made primarily from competitors to the iTMS. That alone should send the FUD signal up in every reader, but history has repeatedly told us readers are often dumb. Also, the fact that the News-Leader.com, a relatively unheard of newspaper, is making these claims doesn't help bolster the case for accurate news.
It's pretty obvious that this is mostly a push from a marketing machine somewhere in Napster to help solidify a foothold in any kind of market. The idea of subscription based music services though, the general focus of the article, is the what confuses me. Why do these people blindly believe that this is the future of music?
The argument being made by Chris Gorog is that for a flat fee per month you have access to some really really large musical library at a cost significantly less than what it'd take to own all the music you'd need to fill your musical device. The key word here being that ONLY you has access to this. If you wish to, say, share your music with your friends, suddenly there are problems requiring you need to actually purchase the music. Oddly enough the purchase price for the music is another $0.99 USD on-top of your monthly fee. The average user won't be terribly interested in this hidden gotcha of the subscription service. The one piece of Americana that these executives have forgotten is the magic of the "mix" (be it a tape, cd, or m3u). Using my brother as an example, he's recently been introduced to digital music only to discover that he cannot copy his music from one device to another. This instantly turned him off from even continuing to use the stuff, and it now sits around collecting dust.
But don't just base your idea off of a single user, look towards the recent past at just before 2000. DVDs had just been released as the new killer format to wipe out VHS and make life easier for all. A splinter group of rather heavy weight players backed by Circuit City, a then massive player in the home electronics market (they still are today), introduced a format better known as DIVX. It failed (read here) for a variety of reasons, with the largest being consumers just didn't want it.
Lastly music is one of those things that people prefer to actually own. The joy of ripping those stupid dog bone stickers off your new CD notwithstanding, the fact that you can completely forget about an album and re-discover it at a later date is priceless. The fact that years later you can replay this music without having to discover that the provider no longer exists, as such you can't authorize your music player, is a bonus. Music is one of those areas where ownership is preferred.
So why have these execs decided to push their concept of better upon us?
Posted by Dan at January 3, 2005 11:28 PM