February 14, 2006
Blurring the Line Between Subscription and A La Carte Music
Many online music projections focus on when/whether music “rental” subscription services, like Rhapsody, will overtake a la carte download services, like iTunes Music Store. I wonder how much these types will blur together.
Why not pay a subcription for unlimited on-demand streams and a fixed amount of downloads per month? The streams help you decide each month what you want to keep forever. Of course, this would work best if the a la carte prices were reduced. It might be worth doing so if it meant keeping people from unsubscribing.
Or how about getting to stream any song in the iTunes Music Store’s catalog once (or some other small numer of times) every year, at no cost? Keep the a la carte pricing, but, again, give the customer a way to truly try before they buy; 30 second samples aren’t enough.
Creating these services will mean significant adjustments in the way music is currently licensed to these services. For instance, it’s unlikely that Steve Jobs wants to wrangle with publishers over subscription service pricing (though Apple is a member of DiMA). At the same time, with Apple’s wholesale pricing arrangements running out soon, I wonder: would Jobs allow variable pricing if the record labels gave him free streaming of each song once a year? Just a thought.
Filed by Derek Slater at 1:53 am under General news
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