March 8, 2006
More Blurring of Subscription and A La Carte
I recently wrote about the possible blurring between a la carte and subscription music services. News.com reports
that iTunes will start offering Multi-Pass, which lets you pay a $9.99
subscription per month to get all 16 episodes of the Daily Show shown
during that period. Otherwise, you can buy each episode a la carte for
$1.99.
Some might see this as a shift in Apple’s strategy, moving them towards
music subscription services like Napster 2.0 or Rhapsody. But this
subscription service is more like eMusic’s, and in that way it doesn’t
conflict at all with Apple’s current strategies. Steve Jobs has always
said that subscriptions are silly because most consumers don’t want (or even
really comprehend) renting music. For the moment, he’s basically right.
Multi-Pass allows people to still own the music, and they pay less than
they otherwise would. Rather than considering it a large upfront investment, consumer
might not mind a monthly fee, seeing as how it’s just another charge at
the end of the credit card bill, along with cable, Netflix, TiVo, et.
al.
Now, is there a market for Daily Show purchases in this form? I dunno,
but I think consumers might be willing to pay upfront to buy 2 or 3
albums / 20 or 30 songs (with rollover) a month if they got a slightly
lower price and it was convenient enough. (That last part is important,
since Napster 2.0 made it about as inconvenient as possible to buy
“track packs.”)
Filed by Derek Slater at 6:29 pm under General news
1 Comment
In the spirit of disclosure, I ought to make it clear that I am a Rhapsody true believer. Just before I checked out your blog I made my wife listen to the new Matisyahu song “King Without a Crown” followed by an Andrew Bird track called “Skin is, My,” both of which I recently downloaded to my iriver H10 via Rhapsody To Go.
You ask whether music services like Rhapsody To Go and Napster will eventually overtake a-la-carte models like iTunes, and I think that you are right to say that they will blend. What a lot of people are coming to realize, in part because of Real’s burgeoning partnership with Microsoft and brilliant marketing strategy via Rolling Stone magazine, etc., is that Rhapsody does a lot of what iTunes does and more, at least when it comes to music.
Non-subscribers can interact with Rhapsody in the same way as iTunes users interface with iTunes–thirty second clips, downloads for .89 cents. Plus, with Rhapsody, if you are a non-subscriber you can listen something like 25 or so songs per month at full length.
As far as renting music, I think you are right that its time has not yet come, but I do think that it will. And it will arrive when Apple decides to do it with iTunes, and not before. I have a number of friends who really like the idea of Rhapsody, and say they would subscribe if only iPods were compatible with Rhapsody To Go, which they are not, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. You can download purchased tracks to your iPod from Rhapsody, but no rented music, thanks to the fact that Jobs snubbed Rob Glaser and forced him Bill Gates way. Anything incompatible with iPods will remain a niche market. As much as I like my iriver, I don’t see iriver, rio, creative solutions, etc. ever taking over iPod’s market share.
As for me, I don’t mind “renting” music–for 15 bucks a month I load up my player with thousands of songs from every genre imaginable. Until iPods are compatible with a subscription service, only hardcore music fans like me will shell out the 15 a month and buy the off brand player.