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Apple's iTunes alone has now accounted for the sale of over half a billion tracks through the Net and that's hardly small pickings. In fact, to give you an idea of how much half a billion is: if you sat down for half a billion seconds, you'd be almost 16 years older than you were when you started.

And that's just the *legal* downloads!

Add to this number the billions of tracks that have been illegally exchanged through P2P networks and you'll see that any executive who hasn't already formulated a strategy for selling digital media over the Net is doomed.

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The demand for online digital media is only going to increase as fast broadband connections become the norm -- and I see that this is already the case in the UK. Yes, half a world away, more people now use a broadband connection than dial-up.

Alas, this sensible situation is still a way off here in NZ. Even those of us who pay for DSL broadband still often find the performance of our connections hog-tied by a dismal upload speed and high latencies.

Never the less, with modern data compression, even a full CD's worth of music can now be downloaded in a very reasonable time -- so why is NZ still stuck in the 20th century?

Maybe it's the vexing problem of protecting and enforcing copyright that's causing such a huge delay in meeting the demand for music and movies distributed through the Net.

Well I strongly believe that the entire business model for digital media will have to change if it's going to realise its full potential.

Forget about paying $25 per CD or $39.95 per movie -- that's 20th-century thinking too.

We should instead be introducing subscription-based services where, for a fixed monthly fee, customers can download up to a specified number of movies and music tracks.

Think of the benefits this would offer everyone...

The publishers benefit because management and control is much simpler and cash-flows are more constant. Most people will let their subscriptions roll-over each month, guaranteeing the publisher a regular income.

Customers will benefit because they should be able to get their music and movies for a lower price due to the minimum commitment that such a subscription represents. If they've got some of their allowance left at the end of a month then they'll also be able to try out tracks and movies that they might not otherwise have bothered with.

Musicians and movie-makers will benefit because more people will download their stuff and thus they'll get a bigger share of the revenues from such a subscription service.

Right now, I probably spend less than $50 a year on music and movies -- but if there were a good online service with a decent catalog that allowed me to download several movies and music tracks per month, I'd gladly pay $20 a month or more. That means those industries would get almost five times as much money from me as they do now.

Would you opt in to such a subscription service?

How much would *you* be prepared to pay per month and what would you expect for your money?

This subscription model works just fine for Sky TV, why wouldn't it work for music and video delivered via the Net?

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