Some very interesting thoughts...I agree with most of them, except for this one:
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Originally Posted by Phoenix
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.
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If I were paying $50 a month, I would agree with you, but if we're talking about $10 a month, I honestly view it as a rental fee with no degree of ownership, closer in model to cable TV. $120 a year is only the price of six CDs, which I don't consider to be all that significant if it means I can have access to 500,000+ songs.
You're pretty much spot on about everything else though - we need a whole new breed of consumer electronics devices that will be able to tap into this music feed, which almost certainly means they'll need to be wireless. Such a thing is a decade in the making, but I think subscription music might be a driver for the new hardware.