I own a Zune, and I like it.
Egads, I know, right!? The thing is: for $15/mo I can legally download almost as much as I want to multiple Zunes (one for myself, one for my wife) and we get $10/mo in credits to buy songs we are otherwise renting. Sure, everything is still locked down with draconian DRM (which is rather easily circumvented) but for my use cases of just being able to pop a few songs over onto one of our portables, or play songs from multiple computers (up to 5), or stream songs from my XBox - well, I just don't care about the DRM that much.
My wife & I both have iPhones and would gladly switch back to iTunes, if only Apple would offer a subscription service (cold day in hell and all that, I know).
There are subscription people and there are download people (and there are no doubt people who are both for different kinds of music). There is more than enough space for both models of listening to music. Just cause’ many people like subscriptions doesn’t mean that buying and downloading music and in particular iTunes are dead.
I’m not saying that buying and downloading music is the only true way, everyone who does anything else is a heretic and all subscriptions platforms are doomed.
It's called beets and the idea is this: just throw new albums at it; they get tagged correctly (from MusicBrainz), copied into a directory structure you specify, and catalogged in an sqlite database. Let me know what you think: http://beets.radbox.org/
Alternatively, I can just turn on Pandora and it plays music I like. It's literally a one click solution.
It makes better playlists than I could if I spent 2 hours a day perfecting my own. It also goes out and finds new music that I haven't even heard yet, but because Pandora knows more about the music I like than I do, there's a pretty damn good chance it will be right.
In the time since I've started using Pandora I've discovered more new music that I like than I ever did when I was buying individual albums or songs off of iTunes or whatever. Not only that, but I actually buy more CDs because I've heard all the songs on Pandora and I can buy the CDs with confidence, rather than wonder whether I'm going to waste another $15 on crappy music. Although, I was mostly buying CDs to play in my car, but soon I'll be getting a Droid, and then I can just play Pandora directly in my car so CDs might get obsoleted.
We're still improving it, so if you have any feedback, shoot me an email.
Then I got a new laptop and installed Linux on it - now all that music I brought on iTunes is locked and I can't use it.
So take that "ownership" with a big helping of NaCL.
FAAD2 is an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder, it is licensed under the GPLv2 license.
It's been much longer than a few months since iTunes sold DRM music.