The Christine Sams bylined article is totally willing to believe the record companies’ claims that this is the future of music consumption. With quotes like, “The way Australians buy music is about to be revolutionised” and “Just as people subscribe to pay TV, this would be ‘pay music’” it’s like the article’s a willing participant in this assault on common sense.

For the record, the service will be a $10 a month subscription model running via the bandit.fm website – a Sony Music run music store. It will apparently offer music from all four major labels and will launch in October.

But there are so many reasons a subscription model just won’t work, the biggest being that you lose all of your music if you stop paying the monthly fee. What’s more, the subscription music model is nothing new. Nokia has been doing it for a while now, Sanity had a crack at it and the US is littered with failed attempts and broken dreams.

Then there’s the issue of portability – this system almost certainly won’t work with an iPod, and considering the vast majority of MP3 players in this country are made by Apple, that means there’s going to be a lot of compatability issues. The SMH article says that “All the songs will be streamed via the internet, rather than downloaded to keep” which indicates that there won’t be any portability support at all, which really can’t be a viable option if they hope to actually get people to sign up.

In the age of bittorrent, I’m fully expecting this to fail miserably. What about you lot?

[SMH]

TomTom Launches Safety Camera Subscription Service in Australia

~The new TomTom Australian safety camera subscription encourages safer driving through improved driver awareness~

Sydney, January 20th 2009 – TomTom, the world’s leading portable navigation provider, today announces the availability of a safety camera subscription service enabling twice weekly updates for safety camera locations across Australia.

TomTom safety cameras will help motorists keep informed about changes to speed and red light camera locations in between map updates, encouraging driver safety and minimising fines.

“The introduction of a safety camera subscription shows the commitment of TomTom to driver safety” said Chris Kearney, Marketing Manager, Australia and New Zealand. “This further builds the TomTom promise of having the most up to date maps on the market, ensuring peace of mind for TomTom users”

The TomTom Safety Camera database can easily be downloaded onto any TomTom GPS device via TomTom HOME, TomTom’s free desktop application. Once activated, drivers will receive timely alerts on their device when approaching a safety camera location. The TomTom safety camera database is verified by TomTom and updated on a regular basis. New updates can be downloaded via TomTom HOME, so drivers continuously drive with the latest safety camera information available on the market.

Availability & price
A 1 year subscription for the TomTom Australia safety camera database is now available for $49.95 via TomTom HOME.

- END -

For just $2.75 per week (or $11.95 per month), you get unlimited tracks downloaded to your mobile phone. There are no data charges for the downloads, and the downloads happen in the background, so you can queue up 1000 songs and it will just download while you walk around.

All four music labels are on board, as well as most of the local independents, for a total of over a million tracks at launch. It will be available on nine handsets at launch, but Vodafone plan on adding to that figure quickly. To start with, the MusicStation Service will be offered on the LG KU990 Viewty, Nokia 6121 classic, Nokia E65, Nokia N73, Nokia N95 8GB, Sony Ericsson C902, Sony Ericsson W880i, Sony Ericsson W890i, and the Nokia 6210 Navigator.

Of course, being a subscription service means that you don’t get to keep any of the music should you stop paying your subscription, but Vodafone firmly believes that this service will work alongside their pay-per-track offering to increase sales by offering users the ability to sample more and more new music. And on the upside – if you lose your phone, you don’t lose your music.

From a technical standpoint, the tracks are encoded in eAAC+, which is good, at a bitrate between 48Kbps and 64Kbps, which is not so good. Although the music is restricted to playback on your phone, where audio quality isn’t really the greatest feature anyway. MusicStation itself is a Java application for your mobile.

On top of the selection of music, there’s also a large emphasis on sharing music with the ability to create playlists and share them with friends, rate other people’s playlists and listen to celebrity playlists as well.

Music can be downloaded to your phone’s internal memory or a memory card inside the phone, and the software is intelligent enough to automatically erase the least listened to track when you exceed the amount of storage set aide for music. However, if you wish to listen to a deleted track, just queue it up in your playlist and it will be downloaded again in the background.

All in all, it sounds like a pretty good service, but we’ll tell you what we really think after we’ve played around with it for a few days later this week.

Me being an all-you-can-eat hater (not of the buffets, of course) does come from the somewhat hypocritical position of someone who, ahem, occasionally pirates music. And I don’t think I’m alone here; once we all discovered you can find an instant high-speed download link to just about any album after less than five minutes of Googling with almost no exceptions, it’s hard not to succumb. With a music subscription you can at least pretend like you’re supporting the artists you love, but in the end, your US$20 a month is far less potent than buying the records you love on vinyl or a T-shirt straight from the band, or going to a show and bringing all your friends.

Also, I use iPods. There isn’t an elegant all-you-can-eat solution there yet, but an unlimited iTunes subscription would change the scenario. And if it was for life, like some of the rumours have mentioned, well, we’ve got a tough decision on our hands.

So today’s question is an epic three-parter (this has been on my mind for a while). First:

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

For those in the “hell no” category:

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

And finally:

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

For a start, it’s so packed full of restrictions that it makes Cuba look like the centre of the free world. First off, there’s the Windows Media association – we knew this was always going to happen, but it essentially means that Mac and Linux users are a no-go. And, of course, anyone who uses an iPod – each song is WMA with DRM, so only Plays For Sure MP3 players will work with this service.

Then there’s the track limits. For $29 a month you get – wait for it – the ability to download 300 songs each month. Over time, that’s probably not too bad a proposition – 3,600 songs each year isn’t terrible value for money. But that first month, when you want to load up your non-iPod MP3 player… You can only grab 300 songs. Worse is that if you do download more than 300, there are excess charges, although what they are isn’t spelled out on the LoadIt website. As a point of reference, Napster’s subscription service in the US offers unlimited downloads for US$12.95 a month.

And finally, there’s the subscription model itself. You pay $29 a month for your music. After a year you might have built up a decent collection. But if you stop paying your subscription fees, all that music will disappear like smoke in the wind, and you’ll be left with nothing but a credit card debt and an empty MP3 player.
Of course, the LoadIt store also offers pay-by-the-track downloads that you actually get to own and keep, but once again they’re loaded with DRM in WMA format. With BigPond’s announcement of DRM-free MP3 music this week, there is no reason whatsoever to buy individual tracks from Sanity.

In addition to the online store, there will also be in-store kiosks that allow you to download tunes. Considering they won’t work on iPods, these have a very limited appeal as well.

If the LoadIt store had launched back in April 2007 when it was supposed to, perhaps we wouldn’t be so harsh. But the simple fact is that the world has moved on – BigPond and iTunes are selling DRM free music and iTunes is selling movies as well. The Sanity option really does feel like they missed the boat, and are now desperately waving on the shore, hoping that the digital music ship comes back to port to pick them up. But we wouldn’t hold our breath on that one, Sanity.

[LoadIt]