Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of music streaming subscription models as the answer to tomorrow’s music industry. Napster, Rhapsody and many other music services are already offering a subscription based music streaming service, where the customer can listen to as much music as he/she wants through a streaming media player and pays a fixed fee every month, which isn’t a bad sum at all when you think about how many songs you get access to.

However, consumers are used to “owning” songs and with subscription based model the end consumer has only access to the songs. This is a psychological trick in our minds and it is very hard to program it out. When you think about it, if you spend around $20 to music every month it is already more expensive than subscribing the music. For example, the lowest priced Napster subscription program starts from $9.95 a month with access to millions of songs. Even if you don’t listen to 99% of the songs it is still more profitable.

Now the question I’m asking myself and you is that would you subscribe to a service that has all the recorded music in the world for you to listen to with a price of, let’s say, $20?