The Inevitable Minefield of Music Subscription

fascinated:

Playing around with the new mog.com subscription offering (via a free 1 month trial, kindly given by David Hyman) reminded me of the problem that time and again turns me (and I’d bet a ton of other people) off from music subscription services.

Working with music on the web I absolutely love them and want them to be the future. Even services like the now-defunct MTV Urge, which had incredible editorial but was imprisoned in Windows Media Player, offered something to love. The new mog.com is a decent service, Spotify’s amazing app fully blows my mind daily. Of course, most people don’t work with music on the web and don’t care this much. That’s healthy.

So instead they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music. We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless. Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.

Companies announce the services with massive libraries containing millions of tracks ambitiously promising to be the complete solution to an individual’s music consumption. What they miss, however, is that their services are only as good as the % of tracks a single person finds on their service. That individual doesn’t care about the other 4,999,990 if an album they love is unplayable. They feel especially frustrated because they were promised everything, but are denied access with seeming randomness (they don’t know that The Beatles hate digital music, for instance, so it seems random). A brutal consumer barrier.

The minefield works this:

1. Look up some artist you like, say Linkin Park.
2. Get excited, listen to lots of tracks by the artist.
3. Try listening to another artist, like, Scout Niblett.
4. Listen to some tracks, suddenly notice that the list of songs is strangely incomplete. Some records have all, some just have a few playable tracks.
5. Forget and move onto a different artist, say, Radiohead. Discover that some whole albums are unavailable, and those are some you really wanted to hear!
6. Explore further to find some albums with tracks that are unplayable but purchasable in “Full album only” mode. That seems unfair, surely if I am already paying for the service…
7. Repeat 1-6 until it becomes clear that the only music you truly have access to is that which you downloaded in mp3 format and firmly sits on your iPod. Keep hope alive that one day, such a service in the cloud will come along, but until then, keep the files! Lets not even talk about regional restrictions.
8. The minefield experience culminates with full destruction when the subscription services go out of business, and you lose your preferences or can no longer play your downloaded DRMd media [src], but that’s simply tough luck, right?

One notable exception to this pattern is Lala, which allows you to scan your music library and the access all the same songs from their service on the web in addition to the songs you awkwardly purchase from them for web-only streaming for $0.10. Not sure how well the process works or how they handle The Beatles, but at least this is a smart stab at the problem.

Until the minefield is cleaned up and people get a perception of being *really* able to access all the music they want (whatever that means to them), we will continue to see the marginal consumer successes that we have today. Jeremy has more on the other challenges of this model.

Or you can build services based on some other idea and charge people for that too, “all the music ever, on-demand” can’t be the only answer out there. This, I can’t wait for.

It goes even farther, because these companies are in an arms race for catalogue size and — increasingly — social functionality when consumers simply don’t care. A consumer has a very short list of things that they care about:

1) Does it have music that I like?

2) Is it easy to find music that I don’t know but will like?

3) Is it easy for me to listen to that music everywhere?

I’ve also spent time with all of the streaming services, and I personally think they all suck to some degree.

Mog is cumbersome and the UI needs a lot of work (Do you want to work as a pop-out player, or do you want me to browse using your site? You have to choose one or the other.).

Spotify’s product isn’t much better, the catalogue is very thin outside of EU chart stuff, and the discovery features are non-existent.

Lala is better solely because of the digital locker (first created by MP3.com and MyPlay a decade ago, so yay for that big new feature), but their site still overcomplicates things. I don’t care about influencing people or my social wall — that’s what the real world is for.

And Rhapsody has an awful UI.

That’s not even mentioning that all of these services tether you to a machine at all times. (Unless you have an iPhone and one of their apps. But will those play music in the background, or only when the app is open?)

The real long and short of this is that no one outside of the 100 people left in the music industry cares. The public’s attitude is that they’ve been told the Best New Thing was on the horizon over and over (SpiralFrog, Urge, Q-Trax, etc) and that at this point, who gives a fuck? There’s no better music source than your best friend’s iPod.

One final point to where we are with digital music: the other night my girlfriend and I were listening to music, and she tried to play something from her iPod that she had purchased from iTunes. Because of Apple’s machine authorization rules, iTunes forbade us to play the track.

After ten minutes we finally just went and Google’d the album name + .rar so we could actually listen to the song. Keep in mind we legally paid for it and had the files on hand, but it was still easier to just Google and steal. This is a common occurrence, and when people think of the music industry now, these are the kinds of personal anecdotes that they remember. Wake me up when someone fixes that.

Source: fascinated