How, under a subscription scheme, will anybody be able to verify download stats to create charts? At least with selling each song, they should be able to verify each song sold with a financial transaction. Without a transaction to reconcile against, could the record labels could fudge the numbers easier than without selling each song/album?

This is a perfect example of why the Macalope believes the purchase model is inherently better. The subscription model puts more control in the hands of the recording industry and less in the hands of the customer. The Macalope does not want to shell out $240 a year and suddenly find a couple of years down the road that Universal doesn’t like Apple anymore and a large portion of his music suddenly becomes unavailable unless he buys a Zune or something. That’s a perfectly plausible scenario.

Now, if you buy a whole crapload of music every month, it might be worth the risk to you. It’s not to the Macalope.

The problem is with people like me, who are not like you. I buy, in a typical year, less than 1 CD. Yes, I said year. When I was in my teens, and in my early 20’s, I bought more, but by now, it’s about one CD a year. How does a subscription make sense for me?

The other side is, if I buy a CD, anyone in my family can listen to it. But I would need a subscription for every member of my family if I had a subscription service (with iTunes, I’d need to buy a separate copy for every member in my family). How does a subscription make sense for me, again?

The concept that I would pay a monthly fee in order to listen to my favorite music is silly. However, the concept that I would pay a monthly fee in order to listen to someone else’s favorite music isn’t necessarily silly. There are plenty of satellite radio customers who do just that–shell out $12.95 a month.

The concept is simple and iTunes Store already has most of it in iMixes. You could subscribe to an iMix and it would download all the music in the iMix. As the iMix changes, music will be added/deleted from your iPod–just like how radio stations work. No commercials (unlike terrestrial radio), pause/rewind/fast forward/skip (unlike satellite radio). DJ Macalope could be programming music for all his raving Mac fanatic fans! Word up!

Obviously, the labels would get in on this–”Subscribe to the Sony/BMG iMix for the latest music from Sony/BMG.” Clubs would be on this like mad as well–”Subscribe to the Club Tech Noir iMix and visit us Saturday Night!” Independent DJs would use this for promotion as well. Heck, you might even see radio stations get into the mix (pun intended)…

And, yes, if I like a song, I might even buy it. Ideally, Apple would offer something like one free song per month or something like that to subscribers.

I’ve bought at least 1,500 CDs in the last 20 years. Let’s say - conservatively - that’s $10,000 I’ve invested in music. 20 years of subscribing to, say, Urge would set me back $3,600. That’s a fraction of a cost for a hell of a lot more music - and in a much more convenient form. (I know, I know. I’m not accounting for inflation, price changes over time, or the fact that Urge surely didn’t exist 20 years ago. Humor me. The basic point remains valid.)

I don’t think there’s been a single month in my adult life when I haven’t spent at least $15 on CDs. I love music. I love all sorts of music. I love discovering exciting new music, and I love digging up forgotten old favourites. For a music-lover like me, the idea of having unlimited access to a library of *hundreds of thousands* of albums is positively orgasmic.

I will not buy music from the iTunes Store. I will not buy music that is DRM-encumbered *and* low bitrate *and* more or less the same price as buying a CD which is neither of those things. But would I pay The Steve $15 for 30 days of unlimited access to all (or nearly all) of the iTunes Store library? You bet your ass. I’d pay twice that. If the iTunes Store only has 80% of the music I’d otherwise be buying (a reasonable estimate), I’d still come out *way* ahead.

The point isn’t to *own* the music. The point is to *listen* to the music. (That said, I’m not suggesting that it’s OK to pirate the music. I very much want musicians to make some money, so they can make more music that I like. The current industry system may suck rocks, with most of the money going straight down the maw of the record companies, but *some* of the cash gets to the artists - which is more than can be said of P2P file sharing. Piracy sucks.)

All new music now encoded as 320kbps MP3s, some (or possibly all) also available as FLAC.

Only catch is it’s music from a whole bunch of independent labels. Yup, no Britney. But they give away free stuff fairly often.