In a post this week on the ongoing problems of subscription music services, Anthony Volodkin aptly summarizes the perilous landscape of the space from a user’s perspective:

So [instead] they end up in a minefield, whenever they try one of these services out. This minefield experience is present in every single music subscription service to date and comes from the simple impossibility of licensing all available recorded music.  We all know why that’s so difficult, but this issue continuously eats away at the real, mainstream viability of these services regardless.  Your users don’t care that it’s hard to license music.

Anthony goes on to eloquently expand on this minefield, in a step-by-step walkthrough of the broken (implicit) promises made by such services:

The minefield works this:
1. Look up some artist you like, say Linkin Park.
2. Get excited, listen to lots of tracks by the artist.
3. Try listening to another artist, like, Scout Niblett.
4. Listen to some tracks, suddenly notice that the list of songs is strangely incomplete.  Some records have all, some just have a few playable tracks.
5. Forget and move onto a different artist, say, Radiohead.  Discover that some whole albums are unavailable, and those are some you really wanted to hear!
6. Explore further to find some albums with tracks that are unplayable but purchasable in “Full album only” mode.  That seems unfair, surely if I am already paying for the service…
7.  Repeat 1-6 until it becomes clear that the only music you truly have access to is that which you downloaded in mp3 format and firmly sits on your iPod.  Keep hope alive that one day, such a service in the cloud will come along, but until then, keep the files!  Lets not even talk about regional restrictions.
8. The minefield experience culminates with full destruction when the subscription services go out of business, and you lose your preferences or can no longer play your downloaded DRMd media [src], but that’s simply tough luck, right?

Extrapolating out, for the moment, from the music subscription service model, the process outlined above raises some really interesting questions for brands seeking to support their products and services with content, including (but certainly not limited to):

1. Can brands seeking to augment their offerings with supporting/branded content reasonably supply an abundance of (useful) content in such a way as to avoid glaring gaps in the information its audience is seeking?
2. Are brands ready to embrace a content-provider model based more upon something like Spotify – in which they aggregate content of use and point their audience in the right direction – over the subscriber model in which all content is necessarily original?
3. If brands are prepared to provide content (at least in part) through aggregation, are they willing to aggregate content that drives their audience to a competitor’s site/content as part of a solution?
4. Fundamentally, does the audience care more about who provides the solution, or who facilitates it?

These are inherently difficult questions for brands to answer, and yet increasingly common points of discussion. Given the abundance of potential content, and limited time/resources with which to create it, it’s well worth considering.

To reiterate, per Anthony’s point: Your users don’t care that it’s hard…

Related posts:

1. Hacking your own products for evergreen content
2. Recurring Themes in (Musical) Collaboration and Co-Creation
3. Registering Complaints
4. Handsoap and the Baking In of Value
5. Reinvention is Coming