slashdot had some interesting discussion on this new service. I still don't understand why and how these morons come up with rental music services...
One guy mentioned how it would cost $7,500 to fill a 30 gb iPod using iTMS... and how people won't have problem "renting" songs because they would listen to the same song over and over for 6 months and then forget about it.
Answers:
1) There are many of us who's dropped a lot of money, in the thousands, on CDs before. We just don't realize how much we've spent. If you can afford a 30 gb iPod, chances are, he/she has already spent quite a bit of money on CDs. (Basically, no one who buys a 30 gb iPod will start from scratch and fill it all up with iTMS, dropping $7,500.)
2) People do have problem with renting music. Most of us like our album collection.
3) Lastly... if we listen to the same song over and over for 6 months and forget about it, it costs $1 (for a song) or $10 (for an album) at iTMS, but to do the same, you'd need to pay $60 in subscription for 6 months! Geez, that's a ripoff...
Subscription based music service will never work. It comes up again and again because finance types can't get over the allure of constant revenue.
Music is very portable, it takes less than 5 minutes to listen to a song... We'd like to own music because it takes very little time committment on our part.
Movies, which takes considerable amount of time, ~2 hours, we don't mind renting because it's too much of an effort to be spontaneous.