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Fixing a Subscription Based World

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The 20th century brought a new dilemma to the public eye – how to consume media. With the advent of the movies, television and radio, people could now watch or hear rather than read stories about starlets, cowboys, and the future. And three models of production were put in place – pay per physical product, “free” listening, and (eventually) a subscription cable model. We can now look at movies, books, and radio programming as comparable products because of how much they influence each other’s content today. They are all easily accessible online. Yet if these objects are related, why were there such drastically different means of obtaining them? And what does it mean now that they’re starting to be sold in the same way?

In the beginning it made sense. The printing press was designed to create distinct manuscripts for individuals through mass production. And this idea  has carried on for nearly 600 years – until today. With the advent of Amazon’s inclusion of a free monthly book rental as part of their yearly Prime subscription service, the development of Spotify, a subscription music service that allows you to create a music library within their program, and Netflix for movies it seems like other media industries are all taking a tip from cable and realizing the gains they can get from letting consumers passively pay for media.

The development of the cable model seems unique. After the way that books had been sold,  and movies theaters promoted, it seems odd that cable companies, that force people to pay a monthly fee for a service seems odd in comparison. When VHS won its battle with television, the movie and television industry started to employ both modes of sale by making a profit from physical copies of their programs.

And then the Internet came. O, Internet. It seems that no one really knew what to do when the Internet appeared on the scene. Everyone seemed to know what they didn’t want after Napster – file sharing and no profits, but no one company could seem to figure out the best sales model after that. There was the ad-based Pandora Radio, reminiscent of FM Radio (which still uses that model today). Although it took a while, Apple eventually created the iTunes store that sells individual digital downloads as opposed to physical CDs. Hulu is like television, providing programming for free in exchange for a few minutes of commercials. Many companies replicated the old distribution models online. Considering media convergence, although the old models work, it’s not necessarily the best way to distribute new media and the old media that is now online. Why should users pay in a million different ways for something they now consume in the same way?

There’s still online piracy. And vastly different than piracy is streaming. Finding shows, clips, and songs online and just watching them, supporting the site hosting the video rather than the creator or even the artist’s producer is now common. From the example of the companies listed above, it seems like they decided the way to fight all of this problem was through subscriptions.

I can envision a time when we live in a subscription-based media landscape. We’ll have unlimited access to our TV shows, songs, books, movies, sports entertainment, all for a nominal monthly fee. And everyone wins, right?

I have nothing against the subscription model. If we’re heading down that track, I’m not going to stop the train. But I think a lot of people are ignoring an important question along the way – who is controlling these subscription based services? Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify all sell a product they don’t produce. Neither did television in the past. Yet, different networks still had the obvious income of selling ads. Nowadays, the ads and the subscription fees are all going to third parties rather than the artists we’re dying to hear or the  teams creating shows we’re addicted to watching. All these intermediaries pay licensing fees for the content they publish, but it might be better for the consumer and companies if there was less of a middle man.

This is starting to sound like I’m against the programmers that develop  sites like Hulu and Amazon that allow us to interact with products in new ways. I’m not. I just question the hierarchy that’s developing online between the  content producer, publisher, and programmer. At the rate we’re going, the programmer is on top. Even though I can’t be more grateful to them for allowing me to access my favorite songs through the Internet I can’t help but feel like the majority of our hero worship and idolization and cash are going to the wrong place.

My final words are remember the musician. Remember the filmmaker, and writer, and actor and all the people who are inspired to make the content we enjoy to an excess today. Even remember the mogul, corporate  publisher, since without them, in many cases, some of the most amazing work wouldn’t have come to public attention. Forget the programmer and the website – for just a moment. And then lets reevaluate the way we approach media online.



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