[chaos]

In reply to:

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"Ya know, I like Pepsi. I don't care that other people like Coke. It doesn't bother me that Coke runs ads saying it tastes better than Pepsi...."
Ah, a voice of reason. Well said -- and right on target

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Well, exept for the fact that when Coke (or even Pepsi) says they taste better - they have a dislaimer at the bottom [of the screen or advertisement] reporting something like "In a blind taste test".
Unlike politics - In advertising you do have to tell the truth (ie backup your claims).


dislaimer: comment not directed toward any one party (democrat, republican, independent, etc) and am merely stating a fact that it is not unlawful for politicians to lie while running for office.

[d00d]

In reply to:

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Main difference between your examples and the Napster model is that you can record and save the "cable" & "satellite" offerings and they are yours to keep until the media you saved it on dies, not when HBO et al decides. And that's a H U G E difference.

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Excellent point Peter. I think you really struck at a core reason that the comparison is flawed.

[jmincey]

In reply to:

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Wall Street Journal - Now this is a completely absurd comparison. People don't subscribe so they can read several favorite articles over and over. Newspapers are all about new, fresh, consistent content.

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And so it goes with Napster as well. No one with the intention of buying a predefined, fixed number of songs would go with a subscription service just to listen to those songs over and over again. A subscription service is predicated on the assumption not merely that an individual will continue to listen to an existing archive of songs but that they will likewise buy new songs with each passing week, month, or season.
Thus the content is continually "refreshed" and the newspaper reference is a valid one.

[dbranam]

dean_0
"There's probably room in the market for BOTH the retail and subscription models"
Please explain to me, other than the immense guilability of the American consumer, why anyone would pick a subscription service over a retail iTunes model. Maybe I'm missing something.

[d00d]

But the majority of music consumption is repetition. New music becomes a smaller and smaller portion of their listening habits as time goes on. Newspapers are overwhelmingly consumed fresh and then completely discarded. There are edge cases, but I still contend it's a drastically different paradigm.

[chaos]

In reply to:

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Thus the content is continually "refreshed" and the newspaper reference is a valid one.

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Yeah, but I'll listen to songs all month (perhaps months) long and I rarely (if ever) go back and re-read a single article in the Journal.
I'm not saying that all subscription models are useless, only that music might not fit so conveniently in your examples of successful services. Although successful might be a stretch. I imagine that XM or Sirius will buy the other out and Netflix and Blockbuster are in a price war that could spell the doom for one or the other. I think both of these services might be suffering from too small a consumer base to truely make competition viable.

[d00d]

In reply to:

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Netflix and Blockbuster are in a price war that could spell the doom for one or the other.

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Actually, Blockbuster's last price drop went unanswered by Netflix. Instead, they're focusing on adding new features to maintain their base (RSS feeds, friend rating sharing, profiles, etc.). I don't think they'll price each other out of business. The price for the service has largely settled for the forseeable future.

[jmincey]

"But the majority of music consumption is repetition. New music becomes a smaller and smaller portion of their listening habits as time goes on."
True, enough, Derik. But there are trade-offs to everything. With a purchase model I'm limited only to those songs which I have purchased. With a subscription model, I have an entire library (or inventory) of music at my disposal. Now which of these is more important will vary with an individual's own judgment and tastes.

[chaos]

Ok, perhaps I was being a little overly dramatic, however, the "war" between the two might not be over:
Netflix-Blockbuster Price War To Wound 2005 Profits

[d00d]

In reply to:

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Now which of these is more important will vary with an individual's own judgment and tastes.

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Absolutely. Like I said before, my own opinion is we'll see only a small subscription following. I think though that many subscription fans may end up getting turned off by it in the long run when they have to go without for a month or two and they realize that they then have no music to fall back upon.

[samrod]

"The only thing that could improve would be the ability to download the music in Apple's lossless compression format."
If you cared about sound quality as much as you claim to, you wouldn't be recompressing your music from AAC to MP3 or AIFF and back again as you also claim to do.
And to those saying that iTunes music plays on only a single player, well, technically that's not true. From the iPod Shuffle to the high end iPod Photo, and all the various colors and capacities in between, Apple covers the gamut of price points and demographics. So with many iPods to choose from, you do, technically, have choice of both MP3 players and operating system with the iTMS.
For the past 2 days, CNN's American Morning has had stories about the iPod and Apple. And in these discussions between the anchor and reporter, they essentially sit there going off about how cool the iPod really is, how it's more than just an MP3 player, and so on. Bill Hemmer said he has a 30gb, and yesterday Carole Castello was also discussing it.

[jonahan]

Ummmm, everyone whining about choice. You do realize this new Crapster service will NOT run on a Mac right? And depending how they set it up the interface may just suck and people won't want to use it. I'm just waiting for the hack to M$'s "DRM" then I think Napster subscriptions will skyrocket due to the fact that you'd only need to pay $14.95 for 10,000 songs .. Run the hack and viola 10,000 songs for $14.95 not a bad deal at all. It will be hacked there is just no way it can't be. Then the big 5 will pull out and the service will die and you will lose all your non-owned songs. Have fun with that .. I'll stick with iTunes.

[jmincey]

In reply to:

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I think though that many subscription fans may end up getting turned off by it in the long run when they have to go without for a month or two and they realize that they then have no music to fall back upon.

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Agreed, but this is a function not of subscription services but only of the DRM itself. Any service -- whether subscription or not -- can fall prey to this pitfall so long as it uses DRM. The iTMS terms and EULA is a case in point; it stipulates that Apple reserves the right to change the file formats which iTunes supports and to revoke at any time the user license of songs from iTMS. This casts the whole question of "ownership" in a different light.
I don't have the exact verbiage in front of me now, but I've called up and carefully read the iTMS EULA and it does not rule out the possibility that one day an iPod (via firmware update) or iTunes would no longer support or play songs previously purchased through iTMS.

[imdylbert]

I wonder how much money they're losing on this? Perhaps we should set up a fund to start buying a bunch of subscriptions and downloading thousands of songs...(evil grin). And before someone says "but when we cancel the subscriptions the songs will go away", i'll reply "that's why we convert the songs to mp3 immediately after download." I know i know it won't happen but it's fun to imagine and play anarchist sometimes.