Have everything, own nothing
Napster had a provocative campaign recently which dared us to “Have everything, own nothing.” Their idea, the same as Yahoo! Music Unlimited, is simple: instead of buying songs for a buck a pop, pay between five and fifteen bucks a month and have unlimited access to millions of songs. With these new subscription services you don’t get a physical copy of the music, but you can have copies on your PC and other players. The only catches are that you need to login to the services each month to renew the DRM license, and that you need to use a PC/player that supports Windows Media Player.
Putting aside these last limitations (particularly their incompatibility with iPods), it’s an amazingly good value compared with $.99 songs. Instead of access to one album for twelve bucks, you can enjoy thousands. And of course, one is not mutually exclusive with the other.
But what I find interesting is how many people over the age of twenty five are offended to the core by the idea that they wouldn’t own the music they enjoy. People who grew up spending too much of their hard-earned cash on music (those of us with hundreds of CDs sitting in crates or shelves) feel instinctively that the transient nature of this subscription content cheapens not only the songs, but the experience of music itself.
Of course this is illogical, if understandable. As Derek Powazak articulated so clearly in our conversation last night, we remember the excitement of holding a new CD in hand, unwrapping it, flipping through the lyric sheets with an often beautiful design/art. We may share or download files, but we crave the validation (or whatever it is) that comes with a purchase. And we most certainly will not partake in something as cheap as music subscription services.
By contrast, my friends in their twenties and younger who grew up in a digital world of file sharing don’t conceive of a special status for the same files on a disk, or some notion that they’re more enjoyable if “owned”. No, for them, songs are media to be consumed, shared, starred (to notate the good ones), and mixed into playlists. The idea of unlimited, hassle-free music downloads sounds great. And subscription services make raw economic sense to them.
One lesson we can learn from all this is that people age thirty and up may be less likely to make rational economic decisions online than the kids (perhaps the only place this is true!). Having been raised on the teat of Big Media, many of these new models feel suspect. As creators of new online products/services we should question our assumptions about how our audiences will draw opinions and make decisions about what we create.
Amy suggests that us thirty-somethings may not be as irrational as I’m saying. “We lose something with all these cheap and easy downloads,” she says. And she may have a point–I know my listening habits are more promiscuous than they were when I paid $20 for a British import in the 80s. I’d give a whole album a lot more consideration than I now give a song. But I’m convinced that the benefit of unlimited access is better for consumers and certainly better for the many artists who can now build healthy, if narrow, audiences for their particular work. My itunes library, with hundreds of artists that you wouldn’t find in a Virgin Megastore, is testament to the truth of this.