Educated Guesswork: December 2003 Archives
Eric reveals why it took Apple to create a reasonable (for now) solution to the music industry’s (and our) problem.
We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net’s gonna fail, Press Play’s gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45’s; then they bought LP’s; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD’s. They’re going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don’t want to rent your music — and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.
And, you know, at 10 bucks a month, that’s $120 a year. That’s $1,200 a decade. That’s a lot of money for me to listen to the songs I love. It’s cheaper to buy, and that’s what they’re gonna want to do.
They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing out AOL as the great model for this and saying: No, we want that — we want a subscription business. We said: It ain’t gonna work.
You remember the monkey with his hand in the coconut? He had a fistful of nuts but the hole was onloy big enough to get his hand in, not his fist out. So he had to let go of the nuts — not all, just some — to be free. Greedy or stupid, it all amounts to the same thing in the end.