The Juniper Research paper on mobile music has been getting a lot of comment today (see SMSTextNews and MocoNews) and it's easy to see why. Reporting that the market in 4 years time for subscription music service will reach $3.5 billion for subscription services, and $2.8 billion for downloaded original content is sure to generate headlines. The honest truth is nobody knows what is going to happen with music. What we see today is not the market in six months time, let alone four years. Look at the game-changing Comes With Music program from Nokia. Whoever can guess the right landscape may make money, but for now, Research Firms doing big extrapolations are clearly delivering a profit.
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With one DRM after another falling to pirates, combined with pressure from legitimate consumers for DRM-free tracks, it's difficult to see how the traditional retail model is going to survive. In terms of product quality, it now punishes people who buy music and rewards those who steal it.
There is an alternative, we already get all-we-can-eat free music from the radio, and that ultimately is paid for by the listeners either through advertising, or a subscription, or taxes.
Governments are unlikely to fund our listening habits, so taxes are probably out, and advertising would be quite annoying to hear in the middle of a favourite album, so it's possible that the only viable model left is subscription.
Nokia's "comes with music" is possibly best seen as a phone bundled with a subscription, and it will be very interesting to see the pricing. Yes, it does let you listen to all the music you download even after the subscription period ends, so in theory people wouldn't re-subscribe. In practice though, if you want to continue to download the very latest tracks you'll have to take out another subscription, so this deal isn't quite as crazy as it first seemed.
We already accept that we pay a bit more for devices which include bundled GPS sat nav subscriptions, so perhaps we will also accept paying a bit more for devices that include music subscriptions. In another parallel with GPS, we could in theory continue using the device with old maps and data, but in practice we want the latest maps and data so we renew our subscriptions.