Is Owning Music Dead?

Its no secret that current music distribution channels and methods are not performing as well. Sales continue to drop year by year, and while digital is growing, it isn't growing enough to counter the decline in physical sales. With this turmoil comes the speculation that different distribution models and methods could fix this problem.

It seems that there are two different viewpoints on how music should be distributed in the future, owning music vs. subscription.

Subscription models have been around for a while now and have seen little or no improvement on their market share. Services like Napster and Zune Marketplace have subscription components, but because they are outside of the iTunes ecosystem and have DRM issues associated with them, its difficult for them to make a dent into the market share.

The more extreme and seemingly impossible solution to this would be an ISP model or music tax system. Removing DRM from music and offering it through your ISP for a set charge per month.

However, this system seems to set a ceiling for music revenues and remove incentives for innovation and creativity. Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch explains in an article that, "music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches"

The last thing this industry needs is another reason to stifle creativity and innovation.

Yet, with the recent LastFM announcement that they will now offer full length streams of millions of songs, people still cry that owning music is dead. This article explains that as these sort of technologies develop and this become the norm, "he ownership of recorded music will someday be seen as a weird historical anomaly, born during a decades-long spasm of corporate enthusiam about — and complete control over — the production and distribution of recorded music"

However, the author of this article seems to completely ignore the tangible benefits of actually owning music. Currently, unless you own the music, you are plagued with portability and usage issues. As DRM-free tracks become more abundant, some of these problems will fade, but I contend that consumers do not want to be cornered into paying a steady fee every month. Music is a luxury not a necessity, and people want to control the amount they spend on luxury items. Music is not the same as television, because it is listened to over and over. It has timeless qualities that some elements of television lack.

Owning music will be around for a while, as these new digital strategies work them self out. I am not sure which of these methods of distribution is the lesser of two evils because both of them have faults, but currently I still prefer to own my music because it has the most value to me that way.