“The CEO of Sony BMG Music Entertainment says that the company is developing an online music subscription service that would give users unlimited access to its music and be compatible with a host of digital music players,” Matt Moore reports for The Associated Press.
“In an interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published Monday, chief executive Rolf Schmidt-Holtz did not offer a timeline for unveiling the service,” Moore reports.
“As for costs to subscribers, the newspaper quoted him as saying that the ‘simplest option would be a flat rate’ fee per month of around 6 to 8 euros ($9 to $12) for unlimited access to Sony BMG’s entire music catalog and that the downloads would be compatible with all players, including Apple’s ubiquitous iPod,” Moore reports.
“He said that it was ‘even possible that clients could keep some songs indefinitely, that they would own them even after the subscription expired,'” Moore reports. “A Bertelsmann spokesman confirmed that the interview was accurate but declined to provide further details.”
Full article here.
[UPDATE: 10:55am EDT: replaced “DRM-free” with “iPod-compatible.” Also added last two sentence excerpts and removed applicable comments for clarity.]
The floundering continues.
Guess there is a breath of life left for Zune. Now where are the screams from the bands about not getting a fair share of the profits. Complain about 99 cent downloads not giving $$ for royalties, but no complaints about unlimited for $9??
Will they never learn.
this will never work…
subscriptions never do…
who’s going to pay a monthly fee to get only SOME of the songs you want, as opposed to paying a monthly fee to get ALL the songs you want?
No one wants their music to disappear if you change your credit card and forget to let BMG know about it.
So, $9-12 for Sony, another $10 for Universal, $10 for… a lot of subscriptions.
iTunes is the answer.
I just don’t understand how this isn’t committing digital suicide for the music industry. What would stop someone from subscribing for 1 month, download a few thousand songs or albums, then canceling their subscription? How can this possibly bring them more revenue and profits than the current iTunes model?
Why not just drop the price of iTunes music to 25¢ per song and make albums $2.49. Seems to me they’d make a lot more money and keep their bandwidth expense much more in control.
$6-8 for one record label? No thank you. I’m already paying for TV, broadband, phone/mobile, dvd. There’s no way I’m subscribing to multiple music services.
I would consider a small charge to be able to try music out before making the plunge and paying for something, but I’m never going to rely on a subscription for all my music needs. If I’m going to be subscribing and buying then the subscription needs to be cheap enough to justify doing both.
If I want a subscription, I’ll pay for Satellite Radio. Oh wait, I already do.
“He said that it was ‘even possible that clients could keep some songs indefinitely, that they would own them even after the subscription expired,'”
Guess this means you can listen to the music as long as the subscription key is active. Don’t pay the next month and the music won’t play?? Like to see how that will work…
No thanks. iTunes works perfectly for me and most everyone.
Actually, Rolf’s interview hinted at something that MIGHT work: a subscription service plan, where if the user cancels the service, the user can still walk away with a number of songs equal (or almost equal) to the money they spent for said service.
If I spend 100 dollars over ten months and decide the service sucks, I could cancel but also choose a 100 songs to take with me.
This has upside for everybody. It MIGHT work…
So we can keep some songs…
so we keep the shitty songs, and if we want the good ones… we have to keep paying for subscription…
sorry, not interested
This is the music Labels thinking on subscriptions.
If we can get 20% of the music buyers to support subscriptions, we can stop selling music altogether and then force everyone to subscriptions. Once the only way to get the music is by subscription it will be the time to start ratching up the cost on the subscriptions. While the public will complain we’ll just keep complaining louder that piracy is losses in profits are driving us out of business. By the time some of the goverments take notice subscription services will be the only way and we’ll be able say, ‘p*ss off we can do what we want, when we want to do it, if you think overwise, we can afford to feight the governements who’ll try and regulate or stop cooperative efforts.
Music Subscription only = comsumer slavery
Music Subscription only = Price fixing
Music Subscription only = No label compititions
Music Subscription only = Artists contract loopholes (royality payments/credits are on sales not on rentals or bulk catalog licensing fee payments.
Music Subscription only = only makes money for the big music labels.
“… and that the downloads would be compatible with all players, including Apple’s ubiquitous iPod,” Moore reports.”
Hmmm … something doesn’t add up here.
1. The article says the service will be subscription-based.
2. If it’s “subscription-based” it must surely have DRM.
3. The article says the service will be “compatible with a host of digital music players”.
4. To be compatible with most players, the DRM must be Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM.
5. Apple does not licence PlaysForSure from Microsoft.
6. Yet the article says: “the downloads would be compatible with all players, including Apple’s ubiquitous iPod”.
As far as I can see, that could only be true if Sony are going to offer multiple formats.
@ Demon
Fortunately, I see the actual artists thinking like this:
Music Subscription only = quality artists leaving big labels in droves
Why would artists who can make a healthy profit on their own, want to shoulder the cost burden for lesser artists who can only survive under the subscription/shared revenue model? It seems to me that subscription-oriented music revenues will only result in even more artistic mediocrity than we’re currently having to deal with – no incentive for the above-average artists to make the extra effort, if they’re not directly compensated for it.