Pay Per Download, Subscriptions Or None Of The Above?

from the I'll-take-choice-C-please dept

The New York Times is asking whether people prefer to rent or buy their music -- which is a totally misleading question. The way the industry works right now you simply cannot buy music. You can only buy a somewhat limited license to listen to music in certain circumstances. That's quite different than buying, and seems much more akin to renting. The real question they're asking in the article is whether people will prefer to pay-per-download for music or to buy a subscription service for unlimited streams of music (with limited abilities to move songs to portable media devices). This is sort like asking what kind of horses you think will pull the next generation of buggies around, just as cars are starting to zip up and down the streets. Even the article just mentions in passing (and then drops entirely) the fact that more than 3 times the number of people who have ever paid to download a song accessed file sharing networks in July alone. While they're arguing over which business model will work most like what's worked in the past and ignoring where all the actual people are, the industry is pretty much guaranteeing that the real next music delivery platform won't involve them at all.