[Phoenix]

I have quite a few thoughts about this... I'm going to be presenting two sides of the coin in my comments - why I think renting music won't "win the war", and how I think it might work, so keep that in mind as you read.



Now although I can keep an open mind about the possibility of a service that would ask someone to pay, say, $10/mo. to have access to as much music as they wanted - a service that would allow them to load or stream the music onto any device they wanted to (PPC, Digital Music Player, etc), and that the "renting music" business model could be a good thing, even if it meant that the ownership aspect would be taken out of the equation, how "good" it might be would absolutely depend on some things...

First, there would have to be some assurance... (and this assurance would be most certainly impossible, unless I suppose Microsoft offered this service directly - it's not as though they're going out of business anytime soon)... the assurance that the companies offering such a service would be around... pretty much forever. The significance of this is that no one wants to spend years shelling out money only to find out years down the road that the companies offering this "pay to rent" music service are no longer around, and after having spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars, as a customer, they don't own a darn thing. That's no good. That's why I've suggested before that the "pay to rent music" concept might be a service that some will subscribe to only on occasion, and beyond that, that it might be a niche market. Because there really isn't any assurance that a subscription investment will pay off down the road... sure, you had some good times listening to music, but it's years later, you don't own any of it, and you have nothing to show for it. This factor alone could keep the vast majority of people from abandoning the value of music ownership completely and embracing subscription services entirely. I've come to realize that subscription services may supplement music ownership, but it would not replace it, unless certain things were in place (which I mention later). And unless these certain conditions are met, people won't treat music like a revolving service such as electricity, water, internet access, or cable TV. Utilities and services like those are necessary things that people need to stay alive, communicate, and stay current on what's happening around the world. Music, although important to many of us, is a luxury, not a necessity, so the masses, I don't believe will abandon purchasing and owning music in favor of adopting the idea of paying a revolving fee each and every month for the rest of their lives - once again, at least not without certain things in place. I think people need to consider the possiblity of a coexistence of both music ownership and rental services, with ownership being the the most popular choice - at least for a good while.

Now although you can debate the value of music ownership by calculating how much music people would have to spend to fill up an Ipod, you have to remember, first of all, no one has to fill up an Ipod (it has far more room than anyone would ever need, anyway), and secondly, large amounts of money spent on music is spent over the course of a lifetime, not all at once or in a single year. And most individuals and even entire families (and I say and believe "most", not all) wouldn't and don't spend that much on CD's or downloadable music anyway - in part because they can't afford it, hence all of the illegal downloading, for example. But that doesn't mean that they can't and don't continue to buy more music here and there and remain satisfied. Now, 500 CD's worth of music is a massive collection by anyone's definition, except for maybe a record store. Most people will live their entire lives content without ever having listened to that much music, yet alone having owned it. So, although the concept of how much it would take to fill up an Ipod is an entertaining bit of trivia, it's not realistic, it never was, and it's nobody's burden. Besides, once you own the music, you own it. You don't have to buy it again, and you can do with it as you please for the rest of your life. All people have to do is continue to purchase music as they currently do and at whatever rate they do, and as their collection grows, they'll have access to this music for as long as they live and as often as they want, and they'll be able to rip, burn, and encode however they please and to whatever device they want. There's equity there and control.

The second thing that would have to be present in order to make renting music worth it over ownership, is the collection would have to be absolutely enormous. Companies would have to offer the public a collection that was as deep as it was wide. The "Jukebox in the Sky" if you will. Otherwise, what's the point? And where would the value be? I can go out and not only buy virtually any CD ever made, but own it, too! Ownership, meaning there's equity found there in my favor. If I don't have that kind of a selection when renting music, then why would I put money into a companies pocket just so that I could access some paltry collection of music and provide myself with no equity and less control? That wouldn't be worth it.

The third thing that would need to be available to make renting music worth it, is there would need to be an easy way for people to transport and access the music from one device to the next - handheld player, to car stereo, to home stereo, to boombox, to work computer, and without a lot of fuss. If renting music would be designed to mostly replace peoples' desires to buy and own downloadable music that they could load onto many devices, or to buy and own CD's that very easily play on many devices, then renting music would need to offer a similar ease of transport and access. Otherwise, this service will be a niche and won't generate a strong response. Some people might say that you could burn the music you rent onto a CD and transport it that way, but I don't think rented music could be burned in the first place. How would a CD player know how many days you played a particular CD that you burned and know when to stop to playing it, until you renewed your subscription? A computer might be able to figure that out under specific conditions, but not a CD player, and so the companies renting music probably would devise things so that CD's couldn't be burned in the first place, otherwise, people would own the music. Renting music, although different from services like satellite radio, should be as easy and as accessible as satellite radio. Renting music would be an on demand service, so people would have higher expectations and rightly so, hence the requirement for a way of easily transporting and accessing music from one device to another. If there was someway of accessing rented music by means of satellite, for instance, in addition to the ability of downloading to a computer, this, IMO, would ultimately be the best method of offering rentable music to the masses. That way, no matter if someone was in their car, near their home stereo, at work, or on the beach with a boombox of some sort, or at their computers uploading music to their Ipods, they could access their music, either by cable internet or satellite, depending on whether they were out and about or stationary. In other words, renting music might be a great way to go, but customers would have to have access to it no matter where they were and no matter what device they were using. Otherwise, customers won't consider it a must have service. It would just turn into a hassle.

Which leads me to the fourth thing, which is that rentable music would have to be streamable, not just downloadable.

Fifth, for flexible access to this music, automobiles, laptops, and portable players/receivers, would have to be equipped to receive on demand streaming satellite transmissions, and/or have the ability to access the online rentable music stores via the internet and WiFi. Most people don't and won't want to hook up their computers to their home stereos - it's too complicated for most and they don't want to fiddle with all of that or access music from their computers which will treat their stereos as little more than a dummy box in the effort to pump music through the stereo's speakers. Not to mention, people don't want to interface with a computer, wait for it to boot up and so forth, fiddle with a keyboard and mouse, just to listen to some music. Imagine if you had to use your laptop everytime you wanted to listen to music through your car stereo - how stupid would that be? Well, that's how people feel about their home stereos. They want to leave their computers out of it. Stereos would need to have direct access to the internet via WiFi along with new and simple interfaces that would make accessing the music easy. This type of change, I believe will be necessary for all devices involved, otherwise, renting music won't be worth it to the masses - it'll be too complicated and messy... just not to the geeks who are willing to fiddle with their computers and network hardware all day. People already have a tough enough time just downloading music and uploading it to their Ipods. Can you imagine expecting the average consumer to figure out how to transport rentable music from one device to another without these things in place? It'd be a nightmare, if not impossible due to DRM issues and/or the rentable music business model, or whatever else.

Sixth, each customer could not be expected to pay for and manage more than one account. One account would need to allow each customer to access streaming/downloadable music on demand no matter where he or she was and no matter what device was being utilized.


So there. Migraine in your eyeball yet?

I've been thinking about this more, and although I'm coming around to the idea of renting music, the things I suggested would all need to be in place, IMO, before it would succeed. Turning the whole world on it's ear in terms of how it looks at and pays for accessing music is nothing less than an amazingly ambitious feat, and it will take nothing less than many serious changes for everyone to adopt it as their primary method of music acquisition and for this business model to succeed.

As I've been reasoning through what I believe are the pros and cons of it all, if I could access an exhaustive collection of streaming and downloadable, high-quality music anywhere I was, and on any device, with an easy way of accessing the online catalog from these devices, without having to pay for and manage more than one account, I would be interested and could probably overlook the idea of non-ownership. It would probably make life simpler, quite frankly, and you'd have access to any song you wanted, at any time, anywhere.

I'm just a bit doubtful that this can be pulled off anytime soon. There are quite a few pieces to this puzzle.