Buying vs. Leasing Music
An interesting advent in digital music has occurred over the past few years, and it’s only over the past year that the technology has become stable enough for the mass market – music subscription services, or what I refer to as “leasing”. This is basically the ability to download music onto a portable device (for a monthly feel) and listen to it on the go.
Service such as Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo Music, and new kid on the block Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace provide these services. What’s the benefit? You can download any song from the respective catalog. Using Rhapsody for almost a year now, I’m able to get 9 out of 10 obscure recommendations and mostly anything in release. For a monthly fee, I have access to all the music that shaped my musical outlook as well as a broad world of yet unexplored artists.
But why lease vs buy? The whole digital music purchasing act left me feeling kinda empty. No CD case to open, nothing tangible to add to a collection, no small square book to read on the train, nothing, just an email confirmation in my junk mail box and a line item on my credit card bill. Plus, hard disks die and when was the last time you opened a five year old file anyways? How much of that music that you purchased do you listen to? Seriously…
This may also move us into the next Apple vs. PC/Microsoft/Windows battle. iTunes has been against the business model of subscriptions while Windows based devices and services have embraced it, specifically due to Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM technology. It’s just sad that Zune does not support this DRM technology, it’s especially ironic since historically, Microsoft built it’s dominance on Windows supporting hardware from almost any manufacturer and now it won’t support a DRM standard that’s been embraced by so many services and other digital player manufacturers. And I thought the enemy of MS’ enemy is their friend…