Yahoo! VP Dumps Cold Water On Majors’ Dreams Of Subscription-Based Music

After the Rick Rubin article where the famed producer/Columbia Records head talked dreamily about getting all the major labels together to offer a subscription service that would allow people to pay for music at a set rate, then access it as much as they wanted. But Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music–who has a bit of experience with a concept similar to Rubin’s–is not impressed by the idea, and he said so to attendees at last week’s Digital Music Forum West conference:

Yahoo! Music is the #1 Music site on the Web, with tens of millions of monthly visitors…But the ENTIRE subscription music market (including Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo!) is in the low millions…even after years of marketing by all three companies. When you compare the experiences on Yahoo! Music, the order of magnitude difference in opportunity shouldn’t be a surprise: Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…if you’re still with us. Yahoo! didn’t want to go through all these steps. The licensing dictated it. It’s a slippery slope from “a little control” to consumer unfriendliness and non-Web-scale products and services.

And surely any new all-in subscription service would be the product of a lot of executive bickering, licensing nightmares, and general customer unfriendliness. Even the players who are just entering the subscription game now are pretty much offering more of the same, with Windows-only compatibility and protected Windows Media Player files that cost extra if a user wants to make them portable. If any innovation is going to go on in the subscription-music space, it had better happen quickly, and had better involve a radical rethinking of the current model–especially since a certain digital-music service that launched last month, which allows users to own their music in under 10 minutes (and with no rebooting):

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

Considering that Yahoo’s experimentations with MP3 were just as clunky and unfriendly to customers as the subscription offerings, Rogers’ hailing of higher powers is probably 100% sincere.

Yahoo’s Ian Rogers To Music Industry: “Inconvenience Doesn’t Scale” [TechCrunch; HT therichgirlsareweeping]