If there is some renting system, where you can listen to all music – and to keep it get this cheaper as normally. It has to be some kind of way, you can keep your music (at least partially) after quitting the subscribtion. Maybe like: You can convert your rent-Dollars to Buy-Dollars, so if you already spent 1800$, you can keep 1818 of your songs, even if you quit. Something similar has to be done to make rentet music attractive for customers.

Back when Apple dominated the SUBSIDIZED hardware market for DRMed PURCHASED music…they were happy with the way things were…even though it PENALIZED the consumer.

Now, with the launch of Zune Marketplace/Player, Apple is confronted with a competitor with a strategic advantage…a feature that benefits the Consumer over the Industry…Subsidized hardware that offers RENTED music.

For $180 per year, the user has complete access to millions of tracks in a mix and match, fill’er’up format. All for the cost of 180 tracks on an iPod. Because the music is DRM’ed, the industry has no fear that the tracks would be pirated. However, the conversion price of RENTED tracks versus PURCHASED tracks has to be recalculated.

The bigger the storage space, the greater the need for lower cost content. And that naturally will drive users to subscription music, even with its DRM.

The only way to restore the “appearance” of a value proposition to a PURCHASED track is to strip away the DRM. However, this still won’t actually increase the real value…only the pervceived value. Real value only increases through misuse…that is, a DRM-less track is only “more” valuable BECAUSE YOU CAN MIS-USE IT!

Properly respected, the fair use restrictions on a DRM-less track limits its practical use to the same as a DRM’ed track. DRM is only an enforcement mechanism; not a rights grant.

So to state Jobs’ claim differently: Exactly HOW does DRM-less music help the consumer if it doesn’t ALSO convey NEW RIGHTS? (It doesn’t.)

But it does help the industry publishers, because it props up the track price.

I have a Zune. It currently holds in excess of 3,000 tracks, which I have been listening to for the past 3 months. Total track cost: $45 (1.5 CENTS each). If I stick with these same 3,000 tracks for 12 months (without deleting any and adding new releases), my carrying cost (if you will) rises to $180 (6 CENTS each).

The magic really happens when I add and delete HUNDREDS of tracks each month every month for the entire year. If I do this, my cost rises to…okay, so it doesn’t rise a penny. It is still $180, and the track cost technically drops as I refine my collection.

If this is a profitable model for Microsoft’s Zune, then Apple will experience significant loss of marketshare, both in hardware sales and content sales. Their only hope of converting their “market leader” advantage into future growth is to ELIMINATE subsidized DRM’ed subscription music. If that was your goal, what would YOU suddenly start advocating….

I use iTunes more to evaluate music for purchase later in the form of a real CD. If it’s an individual song I will buy it, but in most cases if I like most of the album (and I am familiar with most of the songs and the reviews are favorable) then I will go ahead and buy the physical CD.

I don’t pay any attention anymore to Steve’s RDF or his attempts at philanthropy. Apple’s not about providing anything for free, it’s about making profits.

Second, I agree with the earlier poster than said making only some tracks non-DRMed on download would be confusing to the non technical users out there. Why can I play this BareNakedLadies song on my Rio, but not this U2 song? Until there’s a tipping point where about half the content could be sold without DRM (and the other half labeled in such a way as to make the consumer feel they are getting an inferior product because of the DRM) I doubt Apple will do it. Their design and interface choices almost always favor simplicity over feature-richness, especially on consumer-level devices.

There are indeed many problems with my analogy. I wasn’t intending to compare Skys business model with paying for access to a broad music catalog, just wanted to explain by way of an example the difference between paying for content access versus paying to own it, hopefully that made sense. Having said all of that Sky have already indicated they have major plans for making more content available as VOD and streaming over the internet, C4/E4 are already doing it, and so are the BBC.

I have many problems with Sky, most of which are a function of their monopoly over distrinution rights for certain content I enjoy and the lack of choice I have for digital TV in the UK. All of which will disappear once quality TV content distribution via the internet becomes more prevalent and I can finally exercise some choice!!!

And lets be clear – With respect to music distribution and sales I’m thinking if services as they could be in the future not as they are now …

This NYT article writer is gonna have to come up with a better claim than this bogus one. He makes it sound like the entire catalogues of these major artists can be downloaded DRM-free on eMusic. When in reality, NONE of their major songs are available on eMusic at all.

I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, but let’s be honest when reporting, at least.

Speaking of music disappearing, it used to be that you could get a big collection of albums and then pass them on to your kids when you died, or sell them off if you get bored with them. When you die, your ITMS music essentially dies, unless your kids have your password to authorize their computers, etc. Okay, I guess you could burn audio discs from them. But you can’t sell a used ITMS track to someone else, legally, can you? Not unless you hand over your password, which means they have access to all the other music you bought in that account.