Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Personally, I can see a downside

So I just watched an advertisement for the Rhapsody music service. They seem to be doing what a 99% of all non-iTunes music services are doing. You pay a low monthly subscription and get 'unlimited music for free'. In Rhapsody's case, ten dollars a month.

Well, that sounds good and all…but what happens when you stop subscribing?

You lose all your music, that's what.

Can you imagine trying to use that business model before the internet?

"Ok, here's the deal. You pay me $120 a year, and we'll send you any CDs you want... but these are 'special' CD's that will only play on one pre-approved stereo and one portable player. You can't copy it to tape to listen to in the car or loan it to your friends…in fact, if you try, we'll sue you for literally millions of dollars… and if you ever stop paying us, we'll come to your house, immediately take all the CD's back but keep every penny you've paid us. It's basically like we're holding your music hostage.

Now, doesn't that sound much better than going to a store and spending a few bucks on a CD you can play anywhere and keep forever?"

3 comments:

Kraneia said...

A while back, Celine Dion had some trouble with one of her "copy protected" CDs. She was so worried about people making illegal copies, the CDs would *crash* your computer if you even tried to *play* it. Paranoid much?

I don't see Rhapsody doing buisness for long, with that kinda strategy.

Scratch

Anonymous said...

Couldn't you just burn all your music to discs before you stopped subscribing and them copy it back to your pc as audio files?

Lauren in HD said...

No wonder illegal downloading is so popular.