New Dealer on the Corner

September 3, 2007 on 11:54 am | In Uncategorized |

A sage once observed, “Give a man a reefer and he’ll be high for an afternoon; give him some seeds and a Growlight and he can kick his dealer back to Tijuana”

No one owns anything anymore - we rent, we borrow, we pay through the nose every month to the dealer on the corner, who sports the logos of Comcast, Verizon, Ford, and Countrywide. People lease their cars; they take out interest-only mortgages, they rely on cable for their TV reception. I recently decided to subscribe to Verizon’s excellent VZ Navigator for my GPS service instead of buying a dedicated receiver. It was cheap, it was one less device to carry around, and its map database gets updated automatically.

At the moment I have a job. But what if I got fired and couldn’t make the monthly payments? If I don’t own anything I don’t have anything. No more GPS while I’m trying to navigate to my next job interview. But at least I can listen to my music, thanks to my 1300 CD collection, now ripped to MP3, and thousands of other MP3’s I’ve bought online or otherwise acquired.

The music industry wants to change that; they want to be our next dealer, or maybe our next pusher, given how addictive and necessary music is. CD sales are drying up faster than George Bush’s political future. Online track sales aren’t making up the difference. The industry sees salvation in addicting us to a steady stream of services provided by them, for a monthly fee, of course.

I’ve been experimenting with two subscription services – Rhapsody and Pandora – and in upcoming entries I’ll report on my experience. But I’ll tell you now: they are both very good and represent a real threat to the idea of personal music ownership.