Let 'em fight, I say. Who cares? I never believed this streaming music business model was that great for the customer, and this helps illustrate why. If you just BUY the songs or albums you like, you only pay the asking price that one time for them. Then you get them to do whatever you like with them. Copy them to your portable MP3 player, or keep them in a library on your network file server, perhaps -- or maybe add them to the hard drive in your car stereo. Keep backups on an external hard drive, or just use iTunes on your Mac as your master collection that gets backed up to Time Machine to keep it all safe. Whatever works!
With these subscription models, you only get to listen to what they keep up negotiations to keep online and stream-able for you. If you want to hear something they don't offer because of some feud with a competitor, you have to subscribe to a second (or third?) music service to access it.
Streaming music, IMO, encourages more of a mentality that music is disposable. It's good for the people who listen to whatever's popular or trendy that month, but don't care about it again after that. My collection of MP3 music includes a lot of stuff from as far as back as 50-55 years ago, to the present day, and I want to know that the tracks I liked enough to put in my collection are there to play any time I feel like hearing them. I don't want to find out that, "Sorry... That's not online anymore to stream. You must have listened to that on here at least a year or two ago because that's gone now. But hey.... check out this and this instead!"
