@gigaom: consumers will pay only for superior listening experience

I think the key in @gigaom’s article about MySpace #Music is that consumers will pay only for superior listening experience, and MySpace is probably further from that than anyone else. Maybe I am picky, but so are other consumers when they have to pay, MySpace user experience sucks so much that I would need some anesthetics for aesthetics before I can pay for it. And I am among (what is probably the minority of) internet consumers who actually pays for music: I have last.fm subscription, and I buy a lot of music online from legitimate distributors such as Beatport, Juno, DTD, Amazon MP3, iTunes and directly from non-major labels. As other DJs who have dignity to pay for the music that they play, I don’t agree that music has to be free. A lot of resources goes into producing music, even when it is produced by one person, recording equipment costs tens and hundreds of thousands, and musicians’ time should be pad for not only when they are on stage. Yes,
advertisement supported model seems to be failing to pay steaming costs – tough luck, MySpace and Imeem. Why is everyone so focused on ad supported and “freemium”? I am very happy to pay for my TiVo and Netflix subscriptions and to buy movies and TV series on Amazon Unbox. Why can’t the same work for music? I would use a service like LaLa if 3G or 4G worked everywhere I go – no question. I would even rent music instead of buying it, if I can pay 10% of the price of an album for having time-limited access to it. I think that when at some point we are connected 99% of the time we will choose having our music library accessible via a streaming service over having it all on an iPod or a hard drive. Two main obstacles to this model at this point are: poor availability of wireless broadband and stubbornness of major labels. This is their game to lose, anyway.