k wrote:

You can't communicate the difference between the iTunes experience and the Rhapsody experience? That sounds to me like hyperbole or else admission that the experience is too complicated.

It's a matter of being able to do it concisely. Other people have already written about it; those writings are available online. Here's one from Joshua Quittner:

Those two technologies paired—Sonos running Rhapsody—turn out to be about as perfect a music experience as I've ever had.

I also use both satellite radio services, XM and Sirius, and Rhapsody is far and away the better experience.

The best I can do at the moment is to point at the Wikipedia cartoon recently posted here. Rhapsody can be like that every time you 'visit'.

Look, I'll admit from the start, I'm wary of subscription-based services because they work, essentially, on the backs of people that don't use the service to it's potential, meaning that I'm always concerned that if I'm not using it enough, i'm subsidizing the company, or the other users.

This is the wrong mental model. It's not about the volume of consumption. That's the the wrong metric. Trying to make direct comparisons to a direct-purchase model is not going to lead to insight. I'm not really interested in apples-to-apples comparisons.

HBO (and pay cable more generally) does not work "on the backs" of people who subscribe but do not in fact watch it, or who watch it only rarely. The costs are dominated by content creation and licensing, not by distribution.

For decades, people have been quite willing to adopt this model for audio/video content. Why is audio-only content so different?

Going forward, "portability" is not something that is "supported" or not -- it is the basic service. Any song, any time, any where, for a low flat rate.

In general, they probably represent dozens to hundreds of listens each. The numbers aren't even close to comparable.

This starts to get at the difference in the services. At iTunes, the price is the same whether I want to hear a song once or ten times. This is an economic barrier which inhibits exploration. Consider if iTunes adopted a model where I could pay five cents per full-length, full-quality listen, for the first 20 listens, after which time I can keep the track forever. That would be a nice blend of the models. You could also generalize the model so that I earn one credit for every 20 listens. One credit enables me to purchase one track; it could be one of the tracks I'd listened to along the way, or another track altogether.

RE: DRM, Statutory Licensing, Broadcast Flags, and Satellite Radio