Okay, I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
It is a SUBSCRIPTION.
I love Pandora, and I use it probably 6 days per week, and for an average of 3-5 hours each day. I have three main stations: Enigma and ATB (new age and EDM/dance), with some Delerium thrown in. I've hit "I'm tired of this song" only a few times (too much Enya; love her, but she was putting me to sleep), and that gives me some pretty good variety. I'm thinking of making a Ryan Farish station next.
But I only use the FREE version of Pandora, and holy cow, I'm not alone!
Look at the percentages in the original article. Do you get it? Only 4-5% are paying subscribers, even only at $5 per month? This is what I've been saying all along: The subscription model really DOES NOT WORK.
You can claim it's due to repetition, or limited features, or whatever the hell else. But as somebody else said, the record labels want all deals to be the same. Eventually, more features will cost more money.
Paid subscriptions did not work for MusicMatch, and even back then, they were only charging $6 per month. MusicMatch had a very good player, plus it was a decent streaming service with good customization and self-learning tools, but that was before they got infected during the Yahoo acquisition. And there's another major screw-up. Yahoo, with all their free email and Photos, and other stuff, could never really get people to subscribe to the many paid services on offer. MusicMatch went kaput, as did Yahoo Photos and so many other services.
People are leaving cable and satellite TV in droves. The only way the media companies can survive is if they charge $150 per month to their current subscribers, and when they quit anyway, then at least the media companies also happen to own the ISPs, so they still get their $60 monthly subscription for cable or fiber internet service.
When people quit Dish, DIRECTV, or cable, if they're like me, they're not replacing their TV with other paid options. I've been off SatTV for over a year now, and I miss TV so little that I have not purchased Hulu, Netflix, or other. I use Amazon Prime, but that's only because I get other benefits from that subscription, and NOT because they have great TV choices (because they mostly don't).
I think Adobe's model will eventually fail too.
Back to Pandora. I'm like the 95% who also don't pay, "even if" it's only $5 per month. The ads for the free version are few, locally-based, and mostly un-obnoxious on Pandora, so I stay, for now. By contrast, FM radio has been VERY obnoxious and mostly stupid for many YEARS ("Morning Zoo" type shows, on-air personalities pushing political or charitable agendas that I disagree with, news that sounds more like a tabloid's front page, and entirely too much attention devoted to sports).
Radio was free of charge, but it too was repetitive, and with interruptions approaching a third of the total content, it was never really a zero-cost deal for me. I knew that and I accepted it because it wasn't an "extra charge" proposition. I had XM Radio for a couple years, but one time, when my credit card charge didn't go through, I never did go back even after I figured out that it was because I needed to update my card's expiration date with XM. I just couldn't be bothered anymore because it was costing me money on an open-ended basis and that was only around $100 a year, comparable to Pandora's proposed $9 or $10 monthly price-point.
Subscriptions suck. They're like a never-ending alimony, an invisible monthly tax, or a kid who won't move out of his mother's basement. It doesn't matter whether the subscription is for a newspaper, magazine, TV, Radio, my health-club membership, the "family plan" at the local gun range, a car lease, or the latest rage, "rental software". This camel's back can't take any more subscriptions.
Food for thought: What is a "bubble?" A simple definition is that a bubble is "something that everybody is doing." There was a dot-com bubble. Everybody was in it, even people I knew at work who really didn't have the analytical temperament for buying technology companies. As a result, companies that never made any money were trading at astronomical prices. There was a housing bubble. People were buying Real Estate only on the basis that they could fog a mirror. The maintenance guy in my apartment complex was even flipping houses, and this was a guy who could barely install a cheap Hotpoint dishwasher in my unit!
So if a bubble is defined as something that even your barber, cab driver, or the guy who makes your sandwich at the local Wawa at 2 AM is doing, then what is left for people to do? Get out. I mean, everybody's in, right? If everybody is "in", then the only thing left for people to do is to get out. And that's how bubbles burst.
I submit to all of you that we are now past the midpoint of "The Great Subscription Bubble of the Twenty Teens".
This is not merely a "Pandora problem." I ask you, is "everybody in" yet? Are you adding subscriptions to your life, or are you like me, reducing them?
