Steve Jobs Against Subscription Music Model

Just commenting a little on this blog post on TechCrunch:

Steve Jobs:  "People want to own their music"

I haven't read the accompanying URLs in the post yet, but this is certainly an interesting topic and I'll probably click through to them when I'm not at work.

Some personal thoughts...sorry Steve, I'm quite happy not owning my music (at least digitally).  Actually the thought of buying a bunch of proprietary music files and loading down my computer with these files does not appeal to me.  Nor does the thought of something happening to my computer where I would lose all of that music that I just invested in with no way to be refunded or to get them back.  Or worse yet, the formats or players change to where I can no longer access that music the way I want.

I actually am a bit torn by Steve Jobs right now.  On one hand I commend him taking a stand against DRM a few months ago.  On the other hand I'm not sure charging more for non-DRM protected files is the way to go either.  Maybe it's because I believe that the 99-cent track is a little too much to begin with.  Then again, maybe that's because I'm cheap :)  Some tracks are probably worth the 99-cents, I don't believe all of them are, especially when we're talking about the Long Tail tracks.

Although, what Apple is doing is an interesting experiment in just how much consumers will pay to download music, both protected with DRM and not protected.  I'm not sure I believe the bit about subscription music being unpopular, I just think that Apple is hugely popular.  My prediction may be wrong, but I don't see Apple holding on to the digital music market forever, although they are a hugely innovative company, maybe they can. 

Buying tracks has not appealed to me, I don't buy much CDs anymore and if it weren't for the subscription music model I probably would continue to get my music from the library (which really isn't all that bad either.)

There is always good debate with this topic though...probably because it is so unpredictable.

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