- think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),
- would prefer it be a subscription (q: I don't want to pay a full price of I don't know if I will use it for life),
- or sometimes demand a subscription so that they can try the full functionality out without paying the full price
And then there are those who pay one-time and are angry they don't get all newest upgrades for free.
My next product will be a subscription for sure.
I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.
If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.
Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.
It feels fair to me as a customer.
Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
Or a third driver, somewhat related to the first two: the customer is simply priced out of the product in question as a one-time payment.
Part of the reason Adobe makes the killing it does off CC is because it's $55/mo and not $500-$600 or whatever. It doesn't require a consumer to have a chunk of money in their bank account all at once just sitting around, which especially in the case of students and art folks is money they may not have.
I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.
But a bicycle is a physical object that can't be replicated at no cost. Digital representations of songs can.
A world where music can be purchased once is a world where piracy obliterates that business model. Piracy will unfortunately always be easier than buying the song. You lose the song? You pirate it again. If you buy it, you need log in to some website and download the song. If you lose the creds, you need to reset, log in and download the song. Lost your email account? Now you need to liase with a human on the customer service team. With piracy, the answer is always "just download the file.".
Streaming simplifies this and adds additional functionality that makes it much easier than piracy by allowing you to search for songs easily, suggesting songs to you, letting you make playlists and adding the social element.
Mainstream movies and music are fast food. Made fast and consumed fast. They have a very short shelf life and new songs/movies come out every 2 weeks or so which is an order of magnitude faster than games. Games take longer to play and many have a high replayability factor so you can justify a one off pay.
Essentially you are buying hundreds of hours of experience vs 2 hours of experience watching a movie or 3 minutes listening to a song. And unlike games, movies and songs are literally the same no matter how many times you play them. If you look at games that can be completed in a few hours by casual players, you will see that the pay is extremely low.
It's more like the market pushed and pushed and pushed until it was close to the only option available and consumers passively forgot that it could and used to be different.
Now everybody is on the quick-buck wagon, and will come with an entire collection of convoluted reasons why it is perfectly normal to have a subscription-based model for everything, especially software.
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
The tool I use is: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
I actually think the incentives are aligned better with a subscription than with a one-off sale. With a subscription, the companies have to work to keep you a member. (Having said that, I still prefer open source software or commodity services since I don't like being rugpulled.)
a) let's you stream music on any device that is desktop/mobile/watch or has a browser. It's frictionless and uptime is as good as it gets based on my more than a decade of continuous use (over 8 hours daily)
b) lets you search for artists directly (search artist, song, lyrics) or indirectly (similarity engine by way of radio or automatic playlist generation)
c) let's you share your listening habits with friends
d) let's you make friend playlists
The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp. None of these services have target those 3 areas anywhere near as good as Spotify has.
While I could see myself buying albums from bandcamp, the lack of advanced music search or recommendation functionality as well as the inability to make playlists is just a deal breaker for me. The days where music listening was just playing an album on a loop are long gone just like the days where listening to music meant exclusively live music. In 2025, music discovery and music tagging (as in making playlists) is part of the music listening experience and any service that does not let me make that is sadly not going to make it.
In addition to this, I feel that due to the way music is experience today but many young people means that music discovery and social sharing needs to be at heart of any service that aims for mass appeal. If your business model does not address social sharing or discovery as part of its listening experience, it is unlikely to succeed in my opinion.
People listening to albums on repeat, people buying single albums, people not sharing their listening habits directly (i.e not by just mentioning the artist/song/album) are the minority. The future of popular music at least short terms leans heavily towards single songs over albums, streaming over downloads, subscription over purchases, social listening over individual listening.
It's like people complaining of the inability of popular artits to project their voices without using amplifiers. Artists complaining about electrical instruments over acoustic ones. The wave is here to stay, you can ride with it or end up at the bottom of it never to be seen again.
For regular people, the #1 reason they can't use Bandcamp is it doesn't have mainstream artists on the Big 3 Record Labels like Universal+Sony+Warner. In contrast, Bandcamp is deliberately designed for the smaller independent artists to upload and sell their music.
If people want to listen to today's Taylor Swift or yesterday's Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that music is only (legally) found on the major subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. A very small hardcore subset buy Big Label artists music from HDTracks but that site doesn't have the selection of Spotify and it's a lot more expensive.
I would be surprised if most non-techy folks know about bandcamp. Especially, the older generation who are often not very computer literate and will default to the mainstream option (windows for os, gmail/outlook for email, spotify/radio for music, google for search engine, etc).
Young tech-savvy audiophiles, yes. But everyone else, most likely not.
SoundCloud was more popular with younger folks. "SoundCloud rapper".
A small demographic intersection likely made of old millenials and young Gen Xers. Music leaning heavily towards alternative, and away from edm and mainstream.
All sales go straight to the artists today. Bandcamp takes no cut.
The problem of subscription world is that it fucks you over in various ways, makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need or need in a much lower scale than your are forced to consume. It's a much deeper and bigger problem than just the social aspect or the aspect of convenience.
And you simply don't own anything. It's like renting an apartment/house for life instead of buying one. And your rent service can be shut down at any time. I'm just not ok with this. It may be fine with young people, but the moment you start taking life seriously it becomes obvious how wrong everything is.
Regarding your "you simply don't own anything". Leaving aside the financial aspect of it, this is a purely philosophical matter. You could say that owning and streaming are means to experiences. You have more individual control over one than the other. But at the end of the day, for most people, not being able to have a say on whether they can access a given movie or song is not a big deal. Mass media is mostly a commodity. And especifically a commodity they are happy to pay someone else to manage. Sure, a pop artist might remove her music but there is thousands of other pop artists there. You can replace pop for any niche style you might fancy. If you are one of those who finds a specific media artifact not a commodity, then you have the ability to acquire and preserve a copy of that artifact. That carries its own problems of course (loss, corruption, access issues, reliability, etc).
In the age of internet, if Spotify collapses, a competitor will fill the market with pretty much the same functionality. Makes no difference to you. A company removing a song or a movie from your service means you have to search for it in the bay of the pirates instead of your favourite streaming service. Either way, you will have access to it.
When folks talk about owning your email server or having your own customised OS. Most people are not interest in the benefits that the ownership entails and are happy to pay directly or indirectly for a third party to manage it for them. The things people care about are the same as 2000 years ago. Their friends, their family, their love life, their work. The consequences of ownership of media ranks very low in the vast majority of the population.
As for the rest. The issue I see with the subscription approach is exactly what you described. People start getting used to it in other domains other than media consumption. Like cars for example, car brands introducing subs to enable your seat warmers or whatever that technically is already there, but for you to use it you have to subscribe. It's a matter of time this starts spread everywhere. And when it does there will be people who will come up with a number or reasons why it is actually fine and everybody should just go with it.
You're repeating this benefit -- and it is an undeniable benefit -- but the other issue you're not giving any weight is that other people have other priorities that can be more important than ownership -- such as a finite amount of money to spend.
Of course, ownership is wonderful -- IF it doesn't cost more, and IF it doesn't cause more inconvenience, an IF it's even available. In other words, the concept of ownership can't be considered only in isolation.
I know all about ownership as I have over 2000 CDs that I legally purchased and ripped losslessly to FLAC files using custom scripts. Would I recommend "music ownership" like that to most others who have a casual relationship with music? No. The Spotify subscription with access to 100 million songs is much cheaper and a better financial deal for most regular listeners than buying individual CDs or individual songs at 99 cents at a time from the iTunes store.
Does my 4TB harddrive of full of *.flac files that I own let me "do whatever I want with it?!?" Well... it's not a simple "yes". E.g. My friend's music streaming subscription lets her instantly load up any of the 100 million songs to listen at the gym. On the other hand, my iPhone doesn't have access to my entire music library because it only has 256 GB of space. I guess I could somewhat duplicate the "streaming" aspect if I go through the trouble to set up some Plex media server with a vpn TailScale or Cloudflare Tunnel back to my home computer. But now I get into the realm of "my music CDs owning me" instead of the other way around. I have paid over $20k in music CDs ownership to have less convenience and usability. So others paying $11.99/month for more music than my personal library with more convenience to play on any device doesn't seem so ridiculous.
But can't Spotify raise the subscription from $11.99 to $13.99 on a whim? And can't they remove Taylor Swift from their catalog without warning because of a licensing dispute?!? All true. But those negatives are outweighed by the positives of cheaper price, more music, more convenience.
Ownership is not the be-all-end-all. It's only one aspect of experiencing music.
I have conflicted feelings about all the money I spent on owning CDs and vinyl records. But then again, I didn't consider other options as I did all that ripping 20 years ago before the existence of Spotify and mobile phones.
Btw, I actually set up a server using Raspberry Pi with 1TB of storage for my music collection to be able to access it from anywhere. Funny that you mentioned exactly this case.
As for the recommendations, occasionally I listen to the bandcamp feed. Not even sure if it's based on my followings. And before that I was using one specific forum to learn about new stuff. It's not there anymore. And I don't like the idea of algorithms telling me what to listen to.
If you were a writer, then books might be different to you. Or if you were a record collector, records might be a different.
Yes, it becomes problematic when people apply that attitude everywhere but sadly it is likely where we are heading with all the consequences it will carry. Most people are addicted to convenience and will sell everything to attain it