Macopinion

Subscribing iTunes

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

The music industry loves the idea of music subscriptions -- a flat monthly fee for listening to all their music. Subscriptions give them a guaranteed and consistent revenue stream, which is far more predictable than having music purchases go up and down with the release of new tunes. In other words, it eliminates the pesky little problem of people not buying music when the record companies release crap.

But so far people hate the idea. Company after company has tried subscriptions, but consumers just don't want it. The main problem is that once you stop paying the monthly fee, your access to all that music vanishes. Who wants that?

Traditionally there have been two ways to get music: for free over the radio or by buying it yourself. In the current world, we add several new methods: pay streaming via cable/satellite radio/TV, pay individual downloads like iTunes, and of course, the classic "free" (via peer-to-peer sharing).

You might wonder why, if people are willing to pay for satellite radio, they won't pay for a music subscription? In a sense the two services are similar: unlimited music for a monthly fee.

But there are important differences. For one, satellite radio offers a lot more than just music (talk and news and sporting events), and for another, its music is offered via DJed categories (many people like having their music fed to them instead of having to wade through all the crap to find it themselves). A music subscription isn't streaming content: it's individual music files you download and install on your computer and media devices. While that gives you a feeling of control over your music, it also is the Achilles' heel of music subscriptions, because that control is an illusion. The music is never yours.

Subscription services, by definition, must employ DRM (Digital Rights Management). If they didn't, you wouldn't lose the music when you stopped paying, so there'd be no incentive to continue to pay after the first month. That means all subscription music must by wrapped in complex DRM. Even worse, it's the most insidious kind of DRM there is because it's both time-limited (it expires after a month unless you pay the fee) and rights-limited (you can't burn CDs, move it to unsupported devices, etc.). So you end up with awkward, limited-use music that disappears if you don't pay.

Then there's pricing: just because the service starts out at $10/month doesn't mean it will cost that forever. Recently several music subscriber services announced rate increases and as the customer, you're completely helpless: you either pay the new rate or lose access to all "your" music.

Another problem is the dependency on the company providing the service to stick around. What happens when they go out of business or just decide it's not worth providing any more? Your music vanishes! You've paid hundreds of dollars a year for... nothing.

Even non-subscriber music customers are running into this problem: MSN Music customers are the classic example as Microsoft is turning off their license servers this summer and customers won't be able to re-authorize any of the music they legitimately bought. Ouch!

Yet despite all these problems with DRM and subscriptions, we keep getting idiotic articles hinting or claiming that Apple will be adding subscriptions to iTunes. Come on, folks, get with the program: DRM is on its way out, and subscriptions can only work with DRM! Apple wants less DRM, not more. Music subscriptions are music executives' pipe dreams, a fantasy, nothing more.

The Real Subscription Market
But I do think Apple will be adding subscriptions to iTunes. I don't know when, exactly, but it will happen. Just not with music.

The real market for subscriptions is not music, but video. Video we watch once or twice, maybe a few times if it's something really good. Music is totally different: songs are three or four minutes long and you might listen to the same one thousands of times in your lifetime. No wonder people don't want pay-per-listen!

All the things that make music subscriptions fail are exactly why video subscriptions work. Expirations and limited use don't matter as much with video: I don't need to burn a backup of a movie because I'm only going to watch it once anyway. DRM isn't as significant with video because I'm not going to do the same things with it: while there are portable video devices, that functionality is nowhere near as popular as music playback.

For most people a video they can watch on their big TV and occasionally stick on a portable player is all they need. That's very different from the kinds of things people want to do with music: burn custom CD playlists, share with friends and family, listen via a variety of portable devices (i.e. a tiny device for jogging, a larger device for carrying large amounts of media, etc.), stream to audio systems throughout their home, etc. While some of those features would be nice for video, they aren't essential.

Another giant factor in favor of video subscriptions is that we already do this today. Most of use pay a fee for television (satellite or cable), with some of us paying even more for specific streams of content (i.e. HBO, Showtime, etc.). Many of us subscribe to flat-rate video rental services such as Netflix.

How would a flat-rate subscription for video content on iTunes be different? There'd be no having to learn a new usage model or understand some funky new concept like with music subscriptions, which did not exist with traditional media.

It would be even better: no more having to mail DVDs or wait for new ones to arrive. No more waiting for a particular movie to show up on a pay channel. Moving iTunes video to an iPod or iPhone is easier than ripping a DVD.

The only drawback right now is selection: there isn't enough choice on iTunes for a subscription model to make much sense yet. If I only rented films I hadn't seen, I'd exhaust the iTunes catalog in just a few weeks. But once iTunes has tens of thousands of titles available, it would start to make sense.

I look forward to that day -- I can't wait for video subscriptions. I just wish that in the meantime, the music morons would stop bringing up music subscriptions.

macopinion@designwrite.com