A couple of weeks ago there was some press around this quote from Steve Jobs:

“Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs said. “The subscription model has failed so far.”

Of course it wouldn’t be smart to automatically take this statement at face value. Steve may be spreading disinformation and/or lowering expectations in advance of an iTunes subscription service. Whatever his motives, his comments made me think about what I really wanted out of a music solution for my life. Here’s what I came up with:

• I am ok saying goodbye to the album format. It’ a bundle deal that with the exceptions of a small number of concept albums is out of date. But at the same time, I don’t want to buy my music a la carte. When I find an artist I like, I want access to all their music. I may only like three tracks, but I inevitably go back and explore the rest of their catalog months and even years later finding little things that have grown on me and help me understand the musician even better. What I’m really saying is that I want access to everything.
• And when I say everything, I mean everything. I don’t want a subscription service littered with major holes (The Beatles) and little 30 second only “landmines”. That just sucks.
• I don’t just want the major labels either. I want all the Jazz, Classical, ethnic, and independent music that’s out there. I want unsigned bands putting their MP3s out. Why not make them available on this subscription service. Did I mention I want everything?
• Next, I want a decent user interface that understands that the single most important thing I do is create playlists. Now, I know some people just poke around and play and rate things. The user interface should support auto-creation of playlists based on behavior or manual creation of playlists. The point is that whether my preferences are implied or declarative through my actions, these preferences, these playlists, are the most important data on the service to me. I work hard to get things configured just so. I want this data to be sacred.
• Being sacred means that the data roams. From machine to machine. It travels to my music playback device or devices. I want it to be stored on a server and cached automagically on every device where I play music including my desktop machine. When I make a change on one device (even a handheld) then that change to my playlists is reflected everywhere in my music ecosystem. I think today music software assumes that I want to recreate playlists wherever I go. I don’t.
• In situations where I’m going offline (with a handheld device or on my laptop) the service should cache anything in my playlists (manual or auto) onto my device and transcode the music to the appropriate size for space concerns. I don’t want to think about it or configure it. Just do it.
• I want quality. By this I mean I want higher fidelity (uncompressed) recordings available to me, even if they take longer to download.
• I want no DRM. (But if I had to, I’d settle for the lightest weight DRM possible. So light, it can’t be considered DRM. I do need to access this music on my music player, I do need to access it offline, and I do need to move it around as I see fit onto multiple devices. But I also understand that I may need to log-in once every so often so that all my offline music can verify I’m still paying for my subscription.)

You may say, big deal, everyone wants this, it’ll never happen. Here’s the thing. I am willing to pay for this. A lot. My DirecTV bill is around $70 per month. I get a bunch of premium sports, etc. It’s expensive, but we consume a lot of media at my house. I would pay $40 per month for the service I described above or even more. And there’s no reason there couldn’t be tiers. People who don’t want the high-fidelity recordings could get a cheaper package. People who want them could pay more.

I had Rhapsody for awhile and enjoyed it, but ultimately the holes in the catalog, and my inability to reconcile it with a decent MP3 player and my existing music collection made it a non-starter (I don’t want my playlists for what I own and my playlists for what I rent). To me the issue is not that “people want to own their music” as Jobs has said in the past, or that subscription services won’t work. To me the issue is that sucky subscription services won’t work. Who knows, maybe Apple will come out with one that doesn’t suck. The track record of the music industry is such that I’m not holding my breath.