Not poking fun. Merely making a comparison. Just like people are comfortable paying every month for their cell service without thinking that someday they will cancel, same will people be comfortable expecting to pay every month to get their music.
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Well, That Was Quick - Bored Already, Not Going To Keep Apple Music
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A totally inaccurate one at that.
For people who want to OWN their music and have no restrictions on its use, counting on your "everything streams and only streams" model is a non-starter (which is how we got on this)..
...and then you compared ongoing phone service to music ownership - very strange things to be comparing - Makes no sense.
That is 150% speculation.
Nothing anachronistic (nice big word - means old fashioned) about ownership. Just a preference that suits different people and styles.
Record companies will want both renting & owning so they can get as much money as possible.
This is all 1000% speculation 
But I am definitely in the same camp as motulist. Owning music is already becoming an anachronism with certain age groups, and will only increase over time. I have no data to support the following statement, but I bet people in their 20's today own far less music than people in their 20's 10 years ago. The pool of people not owning music and using only/primarily streaming sub services is going to grow, and the pool of people that own and want to own vast music libraries is only going to shrink.
But I am definitely in the same camp as motulist. Owning music is already becoming an anachronism with certain age groups, and will only increase over time. I have no data to support the following statement, but I bet people in their 20's today own far less music than people in their 20's 10 years ago. The pool of people not owning music and using only/primarily streaming sub services is going to grow, and the pool of people that own and want to own vast music libraries is only going to shrink.
This is all 1000% speculation
Funny thing is, the very idea of owning music is a relatively new phenomenon.
Before records were invented, you didn't own any recorded music; you made it, instead. And I think that old people often have small record collections even today, because it was later that buying music really took off.
Unfortunately, music seems to be dying or dead in every genre, be it classical, pop or any other. This may be the natural course of events. After all, the building blocks of music haven't changed in human history. How much music can be written in C major?
I think that the current streaming paradigm is flawed, which is why its uptake is still low. I think that a combined renting/buying model could work. Apple Music is not it.
The issue is that once my kids are on Apple Music and start building their own Libraries of pay-to-rent music, we/they will be stuck with that model in perpetuity.
There isn't enough benefit (New Music) to offset the detriment (Expense) for the long-haul considering my personal Library already has 25,000+ songs with the very best of artists/albums/songs from 1955 to 2015. I know my kids, they're not going to be buying an average of 12 albums a year to make this endeavor worthwhile.
Nice try by Apple to turn into Comcast though. I give them that.
BJ
Ping was Apple's "let's try social media!" moment and it didn't cost consumers anything.
Apple Music is highway robbery. I doubt Mr. Jobs would have rolled out a shill like Jimmy Iovine to pimp a product designed to fleece customers by changing an established business model that worked in the consumers favor for a century and put it squarely in the hands of the content providers.
You listen to music for free and decide what you want to pay for. You buy only what you're interested in.
We all know that a typical album has 12 songs and 9 of them suck. It was bad enough in the 80s when you had to spend $15 to get just those 3 good ones. iTunes made it better when you could just spend $3 to get those good songs and forget the rest.
Apple Music makes you pay $120 a year for the rest of your life to listen to the 30 songs a year that actually mean something to you. The reason we hate Cable TV and HBO is because we have to pay every month for 100% of the content where only 10% is interesting and we get to keep 0% of it. Apple Music, same thing. I'm a huge Apple fan, this is a tragic turn of events for the one company that was always pro-consumer.
BJ
Funny thing is, I'm usually an Apple apologist myself.
This time they're trying to play us for fools and there is an ulterior motive here that is so disingenuous it puts Apple on par with cable companies, mobile phone companies, and other big businesses who are out to make a buck instead of protecting its consumers.
BJ
There aren't enough Movies anyone wants to own and no one watches a movie, even an all-time-favorite, more than once a year.
Music is different. It's in the background, not the focus. I can listen to a new album for a month as I drive to work and such, eventually I pick the best 3 songs and move them to one of my mix playlists and listen to the entire album a few times a year. A movie you watch once a year; a song you listen to dozens of times a year. Owning music is much more important than owning a movie.
Where there is commonality is that just like Movies, there aren't enough good Albums every year to make any subscription service worth it.
BJ
I've said many times it's stupid to pay to be advertised to but kids today they do's things different.
Still don't know if this was or wasnt Steves vision for music. You can still buy the old fashioned way. No ones forcing you to buy apple music subscriptions but ping could have been a stepping stone to this as its built into apple music.
If there are millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog, only a few thousand are actually within a Genre and Artist subset that the typical consumer will want to engage with.
And after that, if there are 12 songs on a typical album, only 3 are worthwhile, the rest is just filler.
Do the math, there aren't "billions of dollars worth of music", there is just a small fraction of songs that anyone wants to hear more than once or navigate to for a special moment in their life. And anyone over the age of 20 already has what they need from the old catalog.
Your argument is actually the right one but for a different reason- being exposed to billions of dollars of music is out there on FM and iTunes and Pandora Radio. That's what they're there for- exposure. And exposure that is paid for by the record companies. Not exposure paid for by consumers. Its the record companies role to break a new artist. Not us.
BJ
My point is that there is already a mechanism for a new band to emerge, in fact there are more opportunities than ever before and they're all free- FM Radio, iTunes/Pandora Radio, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Justin Bieber was just a kid with a webcam and now he's an industry. If my kids want to discover new music, they get a text from a friend and ultimately go to YouTube, simple as that.
So it's not about discovery, it's about ownership. The question becomes, do you need a subscription service for the new bands/songs you truly care about? Or is it better to just pay for the songs you want every month? And the answer is if you don't pay for and download 120 songs a year, no, you shouldn't use a subscription service.
BJ
Bad analogy.
Cellphones are a service, Music is a product. I pay $200 a month for electricity because I can't generate it myself. I won't pay $30 a month for milk if I only consume $5 worth.
BJ
It's a bad analogy to you because of how you view music. Music consumption is becoming no different than cell phone service or cable TV service. Fewer and fewer people view is as something that is to be owned. You do, so that affects your perception of its value. You will obviously disagree, as many in this thread have. But engage almost any twenty-something, and you'll get a sense of what the future holds.
"Your music" is there to stream until the artist or label decides to pull it for whatever reason or the service goes out of business.
Did you not get the memo? Drenand Irvine have said for Apple music to work people have to start seeing it as a service/utility
If Music is a consumable, which it may be to some, then free iTunes Radio is the answer. Always fresh, always new, unpredictable, get your fill of Adele one year, poof she's gone, get your fill of Taylor Swift the next, poof she's gone, onto the next one.
It's stupid to pay for that as you get it for free right now.
What we're talking about are the handful of songs that you want to keep forever, not wait for them to come on randomly and inconsistently, not something that can be pulled away by a record company.
Free iTunes Radio plus the occasional paid download is the answer. Apple Radio is a sham. You're paying for what's free and you're over paying for what's a-la-carte. Don't be fooled.
BJ
Your opinion is entirely valid. But change is already happening. As I mentioned previously, when cable TV hit, people probably said the same thing about having to pay for what is already free. We are moving ever closer to the same kind of tipping point for music.
Well the original poster has a 20k song library. If he paid for it all that is over $20,000. At $10 a month it would take close to 200 years to spend the same amount on apple music. Plus you get 29,980,000 more songs.
So yeah if you think getting way more content for way less money is a rip off money grab...
Artists get paid on streaming based on how often they are listened to. Streaming actually is much better at rewarding artists who put out a lot of quality. In the album era of music people might buy a cd for one song then only listen to it a handful of times but the labels and artists sold 10-15 songs. With streaming if you listen to an artist regularly it provides much greater distinctive feedback to what people are actually listening to.
Not happening.
The only way I'd pay Apple $120 a year is for unlimited song downloads. I don't need them bookmarking streams and playlists and holding them hostage. I pay $120, I get all the whiz-bang Apple Music features, and any song I choose to pull down and archive is mine. Forever.
The features that Apple Music brings are compelling; it's the lack of permanent content and the issue of data charges that are deal killers. Curated playlists, competent DJ's, breaking new tracks, that's all great stuff. And if there were no such thing as records, CD's, and iTunes downloads maybe it would even be acceptable. But I'm not going to be on the hook for $120 per year to listen to what essentially is just a custom radio station. There's no ownership. That's dangerous. And it's not worth $120 a year to listen to curated music, folks. It's just not.
BJ
I've been saying this sort of thing for a long time
parents just aren't educating their kids these days.that usually tails off as we grow older though doesn't it?
The labels and artists get an average of $7.22 out of each $9.99 monthly subscription. Streaming services are not taking most of the money as you imply.
You also way underestimate the cost to print CDs and packaging and then distributing them to the store while the retailer still takes at least as big a chunk out of the total sales price as AM 28%.
No the problem for the labels is people no longer pay $15 for two songs but this dynamic changed long before streaming.
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