Umm...so? The value I get from music is from *listening* to it, not from *owning* it. I would much, much, much rather pay $15/month for unlimited music.
And so what if the music dissapears if I decide to, for example, switch providers from Rhapsody to Napster or something? All the subscription services have more or less the same catalog of songs, so the next time you think of a song that you want to play, you can quickly search your new provider for the song, and in a few seconds you can be downloading the whole album. And since the song starts playing almost immediately while you're downloading it, it's almost as if it was already in your library.
Sheesh, all you people criticizing subscription services have no idea what you're talking about. I've taken Yahoo Music, Napster, and Rhapsody for a test run, so I can fairly compare them against each other and also to the iTunes store. And honestly, the whole, "your music dissapears" issue was just not a factor. It's just a total paradigm shift.
Think of it this way: in the time it takes you to search through your library to find a song/album and play it, you can search on a subscription service for *every song ever made* (ok, not really of course, but still, we're talking about millions of songs), and be playing that very same song/album in about the same time. In one case you're searching your own relatively limited music collection, in another case you're searching a catalog of millions of songs. The end result is the same: within a few seconds you're playing the song. And by the time the song finishes playing, in both cases it will be in your hard drive.
Also, the "custom radio station" feature is fantastic for music discovery. If you've used Pandora you know what I'm talking about. But the thing is, with a subscription service, you can copy that song to your library at no additional incremental cost. You don't have to pay an additional $0.99 cents to download that cool song that you've never heard before. You've already paid a flat subscritpion rate, so you're much, much more likely to take a chance and download that song you just heard, because the only cost is another 5MB or so on your hard drive. And not necessarily even that, because you can also "bookmark" a song which means it will *only* play in streaming mode (and thus only when your are connected to the internet).
Believe me, it may not happen this year or the next, but eventually subscriptions *will* be the dominant model. It's just too good a deal for the consumer for it not to happen.
