g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Sunday, November 23, 2008
06:24 - Keep as many as you want; cancel anytime
http://gizmodo.com/5094974/how-i-plan-to-taste-music

(top)
Well, I'll be: Microsoft seems to have hit on an actual decent idea for their Zune system:

Microsoft's Zune team, of all people, are allowing subscription music buyers to keep 10 songs a month from their subscription downloads. Their whole collection. And 90% of the songs you keep will be DRM free, with the other 10% (wimps) coming along shortly I SHOULD HOPE. The cost is $15 a month, so $5 more than the cost of buying the tracks individually. It's worth the cost of being able to really explore the musical landscape again while keeping the prospect of fully owning my music at the end of a day. All in all, though, it's much like when we were kids and the radio was the focus of my musical world.

When I was younger, I listened to Z100 as we drove from Jersey to Queens and would later pick up cassette singles at the local mall. Maybe I'm just old and crotchety now, but to me modern radio is a corrupt clusterfuck owned by the RIAA and Washington DC lobbyists, attacking helpful companies like Pandora that try to recommend new music based on our existing tastes. Industry power struggles aside, satellite radio has the same problem. It doesn't know that I hate the song it's about to play three times in two hours on a roadtrip. I enjoy the control of digital downloads, but miss the constant exposure to radio coupled with the conversations I could have at the record store: Fresh, timely exposure plus the occasional music purchase.

Of course, the subscription model isn't new. Subscription services combined with recommendation engines were a great idea, but ultimately not one that had many takers, because many people, including me, saw no reason to shell out money for music that would eventually and inevitably evaporate when the subscription ended. With this hybridized service, the new Zune Pass changes that. At the end of the day, you've got the structured presentation of iTunes/Zune software combined with the Mix recommendation engine with full access to an almost endless set of tracks that you can explore. And for the really special songs you want to play for your future kids, you can keep them forever and ever and play on any device you want, Zune or iPod.

There's all kinds of different people with different approaches to buying music out there. For me, the a la carte buy-to-download model of iTunes is pretty ideal, because I simply don't look to buy music often enough to involve myself in an involved browsing procedure. I'm seized maybe once a month with an unaccountable desire to go look into some weird genre and poke around through a few 30-second clips and maybe download a few tracks, but in between I'm perfectly happy just letting the iPod in my car (which is the only place I listen to music these days anyway, which I'm sure also makes me unusual) skip merrily through its random-shuffled library.

But others, like this guy, are all about finding new stuff, preferably as unbidden as possible. If his preferred model is the radio, where all you have to do is listen to a stream of (preferably personalized) music, some new and some old, and press a button to buy the ones you like, well, it's the Pandora model—which, as he says, is hobbled by regulation. It's even more straightforward than that, in fact, since the tracks stay on your computer and you don't have to go sleuthing through third-party apps to get a downloadable copy.

I've always liked Pandora, though I've seldom had the free time to sit down and really use it (I simply can't listen to music when I'm working—too distracting—and it's not something I can do anywhere but in front of my computer). This could potentially go somewhere.

The only problem I can think of is that 10 songs usually don't equal an album, and some might prefer to get $9.99 worth of credit to use on 10 tracks or an album. And for some of you, this being on PC only and Zune only will be a dealbreaker. Which is why I'm hoping this hybrid music sub/buy model spreads like wildfire.

I'd love to know what pressures even remain to produce music in "album" form—from the artists wishing to submit work in big monolithic chunks, or from consumers still wanting to buy them on CD. Wouldn't both sides of the equation be just as happy producing and consuming music on a track-by-track basis? Who cares about the artificial construct of "album" in a model like this one? Trying to arrange ten songs from a subscription service such that it fits an "album" model is completely arbitrary and exists only because of legacy expectations. Kudos to Microsoft if they're consciously encouraging the extinction of that mindset.

I do think it's funny, though, that because the tracks are (mostly) DRM-free, this model is not exclusive to the Zune, as in the player; it makes the Zune store into just another service whose products can play on whatever devices people actually have. Now that the death of DRM is making the choice of player less relevant, the forces in play are causing the stores to have to relinquish their designs on locked-in store-player ecosystems—which might have been the only thing that could have saved the Zune players. Talk about damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't: the Zune was doomed in a DRM-exclusive world, and it's even more doomed in a DRM-free world.

It would be interesting to see if this idea gets more currency than the plain-jane subscription services that have been floundering along for the last five years. If it does, Apple might have to rethink it's long-standing and adamant position that rental might be a fine model for movies, but people just don't want to rent their music. I've happened to agree with that position, myself. But who'd have thought it would be Microsoft who'd say, "Well, what about rent-to-own?"

Via JMH.
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