Actually? It's Probably Not True. But If It Were.....

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on March 20

So it appears yesterday’s story in the FT about negotiations between Apple and the major record labels on a subscription model were more wishful thinking on someone’s part, and less based on any actual negotiations taking place.

This doesn’t make the idea of a subscription option any less interesting. When I was in high school, CDs were still relatively new, and kind of expensive. There was in the town I lived in, a video store, that in addition to videocassette movie rentals, also rented CDs. I was in that place constantly. Of course the deal was, you were supposed to take the CD home and listen to it — just listen to it, and then bring it back. But of course everyone would take them home and copy them to cassette tapes. It wasn’t long before someone with some kind of authority found out about this little operation and shut the CD-rental business down. But the same thing has gone on at public libraries for years. When I was even younger and had my first stereo, I checked out records from the public library and if I liked them I copied them to tape, without even having to pay the rental fee at that store.

But through both experiences, I discovered a lot of great albums that are, legally, in my CD collection today, and on my iPod today.

Think of subscriptions, less as rentals, and as more of a music discovery service on steroids, or maybe a library. I can say that I for one tried Rhapsody for awhile, and kinda liked it. If I was curious about this or that album, or some artist with whom I wasn’t familiar, I’d give ‘em a try on Rhapsody, and listen to it all the way through. If I liked it, I’d head over to iTunes and buy it. I discovered some pretty good stuff that way. (Eventually I cancelled Rhapsody because it kept crashing on me.)

In any event, if iTunes were to offer a subscription plan, I’d be all over it. I love digging around the iTunes library looking for interesting gems. It’s almost, but not quite, as fun as visiting a good record store. The key would be making the two service tracks exist in parallel. I’ve lately taken to listening to classical music, but am not an experienced buyer, so I’d like to sample things a little more thoroughly before buying, and in most cases a 30-second clip just isn’t going to cut it as a preview. If in the course of trying a few albums via subscription, I find a few albums I can’t live without, I’d completely go back to the store and buy it. I’d totally pay Apple $10 a month for this and probably spend a lot more time perusing the holdings of the store, and I might even end up buying more.

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