I read a blog post about the concept of music ownership on Tech Crunch the other day and it inspired me to share my thoughts.  The topic thrown up for discussion was whether the concept of ownership of music (single purchase, locally stored) will be replaced by a lease model (monthly service fee for access to a library of music stored “in the cloud”).

Let me start by saying “I hope so.”  I have long favored this type of music consumption.  I love music.  In college, I downloaded music incessantly, growing my collection to close to 40,000 songs.  But I don’t have time for that anymore - I would glad pay $10 or $15/month for unlimited access to an endless library of music across multiple devices of my choice.  Unfortunately, due to DRM restrictions and proprietary platforms the latter requirement has been lacking to this point, and these services and floundered rather than flourished.

That said, I think that over time the leasing model will become more accepted as the use cases and benefits begin to rival ownership.  The record companies just need to let go.  Let’s be honest - I didn’t buy my 40,000 songs in college.  And I wouldn’t buy them now.  In an era of digital music, its too easy to share, and the marginal cost of distribution  for music approaches zero (meaning once the original tack is produced it costs almost nothing to make a million digital copies) for both record companies and users.  Something has got to change.

Predictions (I’m not psychic, many of these things are already happening):

-  Mass DRM will fail and platforms will standardize.
-  Some users will still buy music downloads and favor ownership, but many will move to a subscription model.
-  Many users will still “share” (sounds nicer than “steal”) music for ownership
-  Standard CD sales will die - record labels will need to adapt by offering limited edition packages that include more than just CDs - think artist bios, lyrics, exclusive content, collectible memorabilia, etc.
-  If record labels don’t adapt they will die and artists will go it alone or join a new breed or music management company.
-  Concerts, licensing, merchandising and other forms of revenue generation will become more important.