$5 Per Month for Music?

In the coming weeks, both Amazon and Pandora are expected to upend the digital music industry and offer streaming services to consumers that start at just $5 per month. Will this be enough to disrupt the market leaders?

Let's think about that for a moment.

Like many of you, when I think about subscription music services, I often think back to Steve Jobs's quote about such offerings.

"People want to own their music," Jobs said, infamously, in 2007, when Apple owned the market for digitally purchased music. "The subscription model has failed so far."

As with Steve Ballmer's quote about the first iPhone---which coincidentally happened the same year that Jobs opined on subscription music---things didn't go down the way you probably remember it. That is, we love the pat narrative, where Jobs is made to be lying, perhaps, because Apple has been known to poo-poo technologies when it is secretly working on that exact product type.

Or maybe Jobs was just ... wrong. People do love to pull down the heroes of others, after all.

But just as Ballmer was right about the iPhone in 2007, so too was Jobs about this topic: Subscription music hadn't found its footing in that distant decade ago. And just as Ballmer has been misquoted through omission in the years since---"Can you believe that guy wasso clueless about the iPhone? What a jerk!"---so too has Jobs.

"Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," Jobs also said at the time. That's the part you don't hear about. Because people---critics, in some cases, but also Jobs disciples---are selling you a story, not the truth.

In the years since, some truly great music subscription services have emerged. Spotify, for example, which is perhaps the poster child for the full-featured music subscription offering. Or even Apple Music, a latecomer in that classic Apple way that nonetheless has quickly caught up and is now an established and credible offering.

Microsoft's offering---which, incidentally was the reason Jobs was asked to comment on subscription services in the first place---has evolved from Zune to Xbox to Groove, and hasn't garnered much attention though it, too, is a full-featured, cross-platform service.Groove's lack of a family plan is a problem, but then the world just seems to ignore Microsoft regardless.

Spotify, Apple Music, and, yes, even Groove all offer a wide range of functionality and each are roughly comparable. They're also comparable on pricing, where individual plans are usually $10 per month for the so-called "all you eat" subscription plan and family plans, when offered, are about $15 per month.

When Apple was plotting its own subscription music about a year and a half ago, it sought to undercut Spotify, the market leader. But as with its attempts at revolutionizing the TV and car markets, Apple ran aground by entrenched forces beyond its power. In this case, the music industry, smarting from the smaller royalty payments seen on di...