Despite the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers songs for $ 0.99 a piece (and $ 9.99 for most albums), the exec's of Napster and Yahoo still believe that subscription-based music downloads are the future.
So these guys want me to pay 10 bucks a month just for the right to listen to music I have downloaded from them? And 5 bucks extra if I want to listen to that music on an iPod (oh, wait, it won't even work with an iPod, I'd have to buy one of these shitty Microsoft DRM infected music players...). And I can't event burn that music to a CD, to listen to it in my car, or to back it up, for example.
That guy from Napster argues that it would cost me $ 10.000 to fill my iPod with music. As if I did not already have hundreds of CDs to start with. And given all that shit that record labels put out these days, it's very unlikely that I even buy one CD a month, so paying $ 15 a month definitely is too much. And the worst thing of all: once I cancel my membership (or the subscription service goes out of business, which isn't all that unlikely given their butthead execs), all that music I downloaded will be gone forever.
So let's do some math here. Say I buy 10 albums a year, plus a few individual songs. At the iTunes Music Store this would cost me about $ 150. I can burn the music to CDs and listen to it for the rest of my life. On Napster (to pick one example), the subscription is $ 15 monthly ($ 10 + $ 5 for the right to load the music to a portable player). Say, I want to listen to that music for the next 15 years, this would cost me $ 2700 (= 15*12*15). Whereas iTunes would be $ 2250 (= 150x15). But the catch is, if I do not buy any music again from the iTunes store, I can still listen to the (for example $ 150 worth of) music I already have for the rest of my life. Once I stop giving money to Napster, all the music I already got from them is gone. Poof. Sounds like a convincing business model to me: f*ck your customers and see how much they can take.
Posted by guenter at January 4, 2005 08:29 AM