I recently learned that the average American household pays $273 per month for subscriptions of all kinds. That seems to be a very American thing. That behaviour provides a nice flow of money to some companies who will raise their prices as long as the price increase overcompensates the loss of customers. So if they raise their prices by 20% and it return 10% of all customers quit, they still made an 8% plus from that increase. If a customer quits though, he loses access to all the content, even if he has already paid hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Other companies of course see how lucrative this constant flow of money is and come with their own subscription models. Owning stuff - like content, a license or even physical goods - might get less and less possible as companies rather want a continuous flow of money instead of a one time fee. That slowly gets ridiculous when it comes to cars. Mercedes offers a new electric car, which can achieve a certain acceleration, but only if you pay $100 per month for it. So it is your car, it could accelerate fast, but it is throttled unless you pay. BMW came up with an even worse subscription model. Each car has a seat heating build in, but you need to buy a subscription to use it. So you own a car with a seat heating, but if you to not pay a monthly fee, your butt stays cold.
There may be subscriptions that are worth it for the customer, but most of them just use the psychological trick of charging a small amount per month to hide the fact that over the years you pay much more for the service than it is worth. Imagine you subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple+, Disney, Hulu, HBO Max and all the others. Over a ten year period that is a huge amount of money. Imagine you took that money and invested it wisely. You would end up with something like $100,000 extra when you retire.
