> These music companies deserve to go extinct for wasting half an hour of a prospective customers time and putting up silly barriers.
Let's face it, they don't want your type. Ownership is dying. It is much more profitable to renegotiate with the consumers that fear losing "their" music collection the price of a subscription service every once in a while.
Subscriptions don't work well for the long tail, artists that aren't extremely popular get pennies and people in SF and LA live in some sort of bubble, as subscriptions aren't that popular compared to personal music collections. IMHO, it's a passing trend, just like CDs and iPods. And don't get me wrong, as subscriptions are somewhat convenient, problem is they are convenient for personal usage and listening to music is often a group activity, with sharing without barriers and taking things offline being the norm.
Do you know why YouTube is so popular for listening to music? It's because of things like http://www.youtube-mp3.org/
It's not much more profitable to move to subscription model. According to Billboard's new measuring mechanisms, 1500 streams = 1 album sale. By that measure, only a handful of artists have gone 'platinum' in the streaming sense.
Music is never going back to the cassette/CD golden age of sales, but streaming seems like the best way to salvage the few paying customers left.
Let's face it, they don't want your type. Ownership is dying. It is much more profitable to renegotiate with the consumers that fear losing "their" music collection the price of a subscription service every once in a while.