“Technology moves at broadband speeds. But the music industry’s transformation to the digital era has been trickling along at a pace suitable to that modem you tossed out when you got your high-speed connection. Apple’s iTunes Music Store—which has sold more than 350 million downloads at a buck a pop—has been wildly successful. But because digitized music can be distributed, paid for and listened to in so many ways, there’s room for other business models that could potentially grow the whole industry. Apple CEO Steve Jobs professes to be cautious about this issue—’We’re not religious on this, but there’s no evidence people want [other models],’ he says—but others have been brainstorming different ways to move legal digital music forward. Now we’re finally seeing some of the schemes come to market,” Steven Levy writes for Newsweek.
Levy covers the subscription models of Napster To Go and Rhapsody To Go and other music service models in the full article here.