I CAN HAS IDEA TIEMS NAOW?

Long time, no post, so lets get down to business.

I had an idea the other day concerning the way we legally get music online. There are basically 2 methods (even eMusic works out to one of these) A La Cart (by song or album) or Subscription. There are pros and cons to both.

On the A La Cart side, the song is "Yours" (I feel that if it has DRM on it, it is never mine) forever. This side also open the industry up to DRM free (really mine) tracks. This is all fine and great until you realize how much money you could potentially waste from songs that you may grow out of, quickly or slowly, and never like again.

This brings us to Subscription services, such as Napster To Go, Yahoo! Music Unlimited and so on. The upside to this method of legal music acquisition is pretty much all the downsides to the A La Cart method, and all the downsides being the upsides of A La Cart. Basically summed up, I pay X amount a month, from this I get "unlimited" access to the store's catalogue of subscription content. So long as I keep paying, I can keep listening. I like to compare this to Satellite Radio services, as the only important way they differ is that with one, I choose the content, and the other, the content is chosen for me. if I stop paying, i stop listening. Upsides are that I find it easier to allocate $15 a month to satiate my ever changing musical tastes, and when I grow sick of a song, I don't feel like I've wasted money, as I am really only renting the music. But what if there is this classic song that even after I've listened to it 1 billion + times, I still like it, but I feel that I have forked over so much money for the subscription that purchasing it outright would seem to be a rip off?

Well, I think I have an idea. It is inspired by an industry that I hate (but the idea is valid, I swear!) The problem was this: How could I listen to whatever songs I wanted without having to outright pay for those songs, and if I decided that I liked some, I could have it without paying full price for it? What I came up with was a sort of contract with period type subscription, in a similar vein as the Wireless telecom industry. So lets say that we have subscription periods (as an option, the other two still being a possibility) from 6 months to 3 years. Depending on how long I make my contract for and which plan I get, I could get different amounts of "Paid for, mine to keep forever" tracks a month, with all the rest of the store's catalogue available through the same idea as subscription. At the end of the contract (for whatever reason it ends) all my subscription content stops playing. If I terminated early, I pay the difference in what the monthly payment would have been between my actual contract and the one closest in length and cost to when I terminated it. On top of this, if a person were to want to buy more songs than they have credit for, it would cost them less than if they were not in a contract, price being determined by the length of the contract.

So,for example, I could be on a one year contract for $17 a month, I get 8 Tracks to keep a month, and unlimited access to the others during the contract. One month I used up all my cumulated track credits, and couldn't wait for next month's credits to come, and had to buy this one song (to make a CD or something) so I bought the song, but because I'm a subscriber on a 1 year contract, I got the song at 10% off it's normal price.



Now this idea is only half baked currently, but I will think on it some more and come back with any other complications I would need to add.