Would you be so opposed to a subscription addition to iTMS?
I think napster has something here, an *optional* subscription based service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalogue, and it's only $10/month.
The drawback? once you stop paying for the subscription, the files stop playing. Is this really so bad though? I mean, $10/month really isn't that much to get all the music you could ever want, available at your finger tips, even if you are only 'renting' it in a sense.
I think the other big factor in this is the psychological side of subscription based services, people are easily scared into thinking that things are scams, and won't support the site because they are scared they will get scammed somehow. Many Subscription services that automatically bill you don't get cancelled till far after the user wanted to cancel them(just as many rebates don't get submitted, that type of thing, laziness, forgetfulness)
I dunno, personally, I would *love* to have this feature added to iTMS.
I wonder how they could handle iPod, which wouldn't necessarily know if your songs had expired...or CD burning for that matter...hmm.
how does napster handle this stuff?
I think apple could offer varying packages, maybe $10 for one month's access. or $100 for a full years access, or $60 for 6 months. Or a monthly rate(auto-billed)
thoughts?
The drawback? once you stop paying for the subscription, the files stop playing. Is this really so bad though? I mean, $10/month really isn't that much to get all the music you could ever want, available at your finger tips, even if you are only 'renting' it in a sense.
I think the other big factor in this is the psychological side of subscription based services, people are easily scared into thinking that things are scams, and won't support the site because they are scared they will get scammed somehow. Many Subscription services that automatically bill you don't get cancelled till far after the user wanted to cancel them(just as many rebates don't get submitted, that type of thing, laziness, forgetfulness)
I dunno, personally, I would *love* to have this feature added to iTMS.
I wonder how they could handle iPod, which wouldn't necessarily know if your songs had expired...or CD burning for that matter...hmm.
how does napster handle this stuff?
I think apple could offer varying packages, maybe $10 for one month's access. or $100 for a full years access, or $60 for 6 months. Or a monthly rate(auto-billed)
thoughts?
Comments
Originally posted by Wrong Robot
I think napster has something here, an *optional* subscription based service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalogue, and it's only $10/month.
The drawback? once you stop paying for the subscription, the files stop playing. Is this really so bad though? I mean, $10/month really isn't that much to get all the music you could ever want, available at your finger tips, even if you are only 'renting' it in a sense.
I think the other big factor in this is the psychological side of subscription based services, people are easily scared into thinking that things are scams, and won't support the site because they are scared they will get scammed somehow. Many Subscription services that automatically bill you don't get cancelled till far after the user wanted to cancel them(just as many rebates don't get submitted, that type of thing, laziness, forgetfulness)
I dunno, personally, I would *love* to have this feature added to iTMS.
I wonder how they could handle iPod, which wouldn't necessarily know if your songs had expired...or CD burning for that matter...hmm.
how does napster handle this stuff?
I think apple could offer varying packages, maybe $10 for one month's access. or $100 for a full years access, or $60 for 6 months. Or a monthly rate(auto-billed)
thoughts?
I'd not only be happy to pay $10/month (maybe a little less), I'd then happily pay to actually own songs I really liked (to say play on my iPod) provided songs/albums were reasonably priced and depending on the DRM. I'd also almost certainly purchase more music as a result.
But I'm just one of those people of a particular mindset.
I'm a little skeptical about it being a viable business model, however. Many companies have tried it, and none have succeeded. For one thing, the pay as you download model of iTunes guarantees your bandwidth costs are covered. A subscription model means you can't discriminate between those who download 2000 songs and those who download six--meaning bandwidth costs on higher users can cause you to loose money.
Also, cracking the subscription allows a lot more damage than people cracking single songs they have purchased.
So I'm not religiously opposed to the idea, but I can see why Apple hasn't tried it yet. If you want that model, you can always go to Napster or RealOne.
Originally posted by Wrong Robot
The drawback? once you stop paying for the subscription, the files stop playing. Is this really so bad though? I mean, $10/month really isn't that much to get all the music you could ever want, available at your finger tips, even if you are only 'renting' it in a sense.
Are you on crack? What I paid for and downloaded is mine, mine, mine - forever! These subscription/rental business models will eventually die. This isn't what the consumer wants, this is some corporate head shoving this onto consumers. It will fail. Yup.
But that's my opinion.
Originally posted by iPeon
Are you on crack? What I paid for and downloaded is mine, mine, mine - forever! These subscription/rental business models will eventually die. This isn't what the consumer wants, this is some corporate head shoving this onto consumers. It will fail. Yup.
But that's my opinion.
the thing is, there is *so* much music I want to listen to, but I can't afford to be buying $10 albums all the time. I'm just a cheapskate, I could afford $10/month, and would instantly love having access to everything for that fee.
How about you get me a gift certificate
Originally posted by Wrong Robot
the thing is, there is *so* much music I want to listen to, but I can't afford to be buying $10 albums all the time. I'm just a cheapskate, I could afford $10/month, and would instantly love having access to everything for that fee.
How about you get me a gift certificate
Mmmm... you caused me to rethink this. If I had access to all the music I wanted and be able to download it to my iPod so long as I was a paid subscriber...
It's an interesting concept. But I just can't see myself locked into a subscription forever and ever just to have access to thousands of music files most of which I will never listen to anyway and then to lose it all once I stop the subscription.
This works well only as a short term solution. As in your case where you would like to have access to a bunch of music right now. However, you are throwing money away as it will all be gone once you stop paying the rental fee.
Think about it, once you have your favorite music library complete, will you be buying 10 new songs each and every month?
You want it, you buy it. End of story. It's yours, always and forever. No bullcrap. MY music, on MY computer and MY iPod. Period.
Pay-per-download works. Apple didn't need a subscription model to shoot iTunes to the number-one spot (just like it didn't need to add WMA support to get to #1, either.) And that's a great point about easily covering bandwidth costs that way, too.
It will be interesting to see how artists receive this, though (it's pretty much a given that consumers won't give it two looks). Remember all that hoo-hah about iTMS destroying the album format? What do you think this does? This is just an attempt to make the old business model work: The labels hype some flavor-of-the-month, everyone rents the single, the label makes money and everyone forgets the song, lather, rinse, repeat. That's all that Janus is designed for, and that's all it will accomplish.
Except for the word "everyone". Consumers have this irrational desire to keep the music they pay for, and they might just like some flavor-of-the-month song enough to keep it. They might not like spending $10/month for the privilege of spending more money to borrow a song. They might not like the inevitably draconian restrictions that will restrict what they can do with that song while they're allowed to listen to it. And since the point of this will be to tie into flavor-of-the-month singles, there will be none of the obscure, original, or out of print stuff that made Napster 1.0 so cool. (In fact, this is one area where all the online services are lacking badly - I'd hoped for much more back-catalog stuff on iTMS by now.)
I wonder how many rental/subscription services will have to fail before the industry realizes that they have to sell music, they have to (at the very least) meet the consumer halfway on the terms of those sales, and if they want people to buy albums, they'll just have to make good albums.
And they'd really better get to digitizing their back catalogs before all that tape molders away, dammit.
this way I don't get attached to any of the music and get angry when it is gone, but I still get to sample crazy music that I would have never listened to otherwise...
Would you pay $5 for that kind of access if you only were able to stream the music?