Rented Music: Your Thoughts?

ScottW

ScottW

Founder
Staff member
I have mixed feelings on the Microsoft "Rented Music" feature. I mean, it just doesn't sound like a great business model. How does the music companies get their money. If I can download 10,000 songs for only $10/month, that just doesn't sound real. Who pays for the bandwidth? That is less money for the artists.

I guess I just don't get it. I would download a TON more music and listen to different bands if such an item where available. But what happens when the subscription service stops after 2 years or gets increased a point you don't have a budget for it?

Over the course of 2 years, you'd pay $240... that is 240 songs from iTunes I could own, I could play "forever". At the end of a subscription service or when I can't afford it anymore... I'd have nothing to show for it, except for the experience.
 
I bet you can't "burn" those tunes to a regular CD, cause then you'd have them for life... and you know someone will find a way to get those tunes to a non-encrypted format... like that tool on the Mac that reads the sound output or whatever.

I don't know...
 
Haha! :D

M$ iPod killer that uses Windows media player format? :p

Janus would add a hacker-resistant clock to portable music players for files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio format. That in turn would help let subscription services such as Napster put rented tracks on portable devices--something that's not currently allowed. Fans of portable players could then pay as little as $10 a month for ongoing access to hundreds of thousands of songs, instead of buying song downloads one at a time for about a dollar apiece.
Click to expand...

If I want to RENT .. that is not to have the music, just listen to it like once or twice ... why would I use that? A RADIO costs like 5 $ (the cheapest models) .. or if I still want to use a lot of bandwidth for it, the internet radios then.

10 $ and download = "rent" all that you want? And where and how much money of that are exactly the artists going to make???

Looks like another lose a few billion $ lawsuit for Mr Gates in Europe next year :D
 
yea .. jhawk, i mean if you have NO physical radio (receiver), a cheap physical radio receiver can be like 5 $ .. without any other than battery / recharges as other expenses .. :D but that will do then for any fm/am radio
 
Sorry I would never pay or rent for any music that doesn't let me put it onto a player that I want to listen to it on. It's one the to have encoding on iTMS songs, but I can play them on an iPod or burn them to CD.

I trade my hard earned time (money from working a job) for products that have some value! Rented commodities like music just don't float my boat!
 
It's not my cup of tea, but I can see it working. At least for the end user. These satellite radios seem to be somewhat popular. Similar concept I guess. Monthly subscriptions and all. I don't listen to much music radio, so I really have no particular interest in it.

However, if the rented music could be sort of like your own super-personal radio which intelligently played songs you tend to like or genres you prefer, that would be something worth looking into. If you have to manually download each "rented" song, that's just not going to work for me. It's fine to DL songs if I then OWN it (a la ITMS), but imagine if you had to download your radio songs?

Here's the other thing. You know damn well hackers will easily bust through the protection, which will mean a freaking avalanche of piracy given that people could basically DL endless songs.
 
mindbend said:
Here's the other thing. You know damn well hackers will easily bust through the protection, which will mean a freaking avalanche of piracy given that people could basically DL endless songs.
Click to expand...

XP was marketed as impossible to pirate it ... less than 24 hours after its release, the protection was gone. They had figured out how to pass it.
 
I think the $10/month devalues the music industry. So now if I was to go download songs for free via gnutella... then I am only stealing "10/month" apposed to thousands of dollars if I downloaded thousands of songs.

Yea, I think if you can't burn them to a CD then it will be pointless unless all you do is listen to music through your "ipod" type device.
 
I suppose its like going to the cinema or a concert. You pay money, you go in an enjoy the show, but at the end of the day, you don't have anything but the experience to show for it.

Likewise with this concept, I guess. You pay a fixed fee which isn't that expensive, and you get to download as many songs as you like. Definitely much cheaper than the cinema or a concert. Perhaps its less fulfilling than a concert, but $10 is about the price of a cinema ticket here in the UK. I think a month of unlimited music downloads is more fulfilling than any movie seen at the cinema.

Sounds like a pretty fair deal to me. The major problem they'll face is making sure that no one pirates the music.
 
for that service, you'd need a player that can use windows media player.
and to truely enjoy it, you'll need a lot of bandwidth.

i think i'll / i'd be a lot happier with an internet radio .. or a real life radio. :)
 
I love being able to listen to a song as much as I want and not having to pay for it every month. I think that's the big selling point for me... I want to own the music I listen to.
 
This sounds like the dumbest idea yet. If there was a way to record those songs that I rented, then of course Id get it :)
 
Personally I would never go for it. However I have a TIVO and I pay a subscription to Directv to get content. I can't really save all I "download". I watch it once and copy something else over it. M$ plan is not that different. I doubt it will work with music though.
 
WHEN did we really start caring about Artists ??? hell i dont care.... ive watched cribs on MTV too many times... and im played more than once around 20 euros for a CD (unacceptable when a DVD costs 25 euros) ....

i really dont care about artists... all of them keep on gettin richer and richer !!!
u have bands like Blink 182.. where the "artists" havent even finished school... runnin around in Rolls Royces... and on the other hand u have university graduates who cant even find a job...
so yes i dont care about artsists and the music industry...

$10 a month is cheap.. and if i could download the songs on my iPod to listen then Perfect..
if i cant move the songs from my computer.. then its useless.. ! who really cares bout CDs nowadays ?
 
its a bloody joke! its like a second hand cd shop. im so over microsoft and their lame ass cheep fisher-price baby-toy looking business models.
 
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