[Sigia-l] Buy or rent?

[Manu Sharma]

Ziya:
"companies like Napster are looking to 'subscription' or 'rent' of
digital music as a differentiator against Apple's iTMS, which so far
offers straight purchases only"

Is this new?

Ziya:
"Anyone aware of any study of user preference on buy vs. rent for
relatively small online purchases?"

Steve Jobs talked about the subscription model and its failings in his
Rolling Stone magazine interview [Dec 03]:

"We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now
are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail.
Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription.
They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes;
then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want
to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don't want to
rent your music -- and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your
music goes away.

And, you know, at 10 bucks a month, that's $120 a year. That's $1,200 a
decade. That's a lot of money for me to listen to the songs I love.
It's cheaper to buy, and that's what they're gonna want to do.

They didn't see it that way. There were people running around -- 
business-development people -- who kept pointing out AOL as the great
model for this and saying: No, we want that -- we want a subscription
business. We said: It ain't gonna work.
[...]
One question to ask these subscription services is how many subscribers
they have. It's around 50,000. And that's not just for Rhapsody, it's
for the old Pressplay and the old MusicMatch. 50,000 subscribers,
total.

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could
make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might
not be successful."

http://tinyurl.com/5ouk6

Manu.