The Internet as it stands today forms the bedrock of modern civilization. It is the ocean we all now swim in, we travel across the internet searching for that precious resource which is information. We import and export information daily and it is the battlefield for ideologies, opinions and data. The conflicts which exist on the internet no matter the magnitude of the implications spur on creative solutions, refined thought and is a proud beacon for the society that interacts with it. A new conflict however is arising which goes against the nature of materialistic possession.
With services such as Spotify and OnLive which offer collosal libraries of entertainment for a subscription, we are seeing a shift from possession to access. My record collection including digital purchases over iTunes will never rival the towering amount of music which is available through Spotify. If Spotify had a physical library of CDs (or even Vinyls), acres of land would be required to store all that information. Not to mention that if such a place existed, it would take a prohibitive amount of time to search which disc I wanted to listen to.
Subscription services such as Spotify rely on Cloud technology, the information is out there on the internet as opposed to your hard disk drive. Rather than storing terrabytes of information physically on location, you can stream everything you want, someone or something else does all the heavy lifting for you, all you do is pay some money and voila, that collosal database is now available for your listening pleasure.
This manner of trading seems to violate everything we're taught as since kids. You pay money, you get something in return. That something is now yours and has it's own value which could appreciate or depreciate. Subscription models turn that upside down. You pay money for nothing to own, the value of what you gain is consistent and will not respond to market pressures (your subscription) the actual content remains in the hands of the service providers. Yet somehow you will have more than everyone else who doesn't have a subscription, the amount of entertainment you gain for such an amount towers over any amount of physical media one can ever own.
Access looks to triumph possession. It's a good deal for the people running the service as the value of their assets will grow as more subscriptions come in and it's a good deal for the consumer as you now have at your fingertips the collective works of hundreds of thousands of artists.
Now subscription models do have their obvious downsides. You only have access, you can't really muck about with the content you have access to. You own a subscription not a record. If a service was to discontinue service, you will be left with nothing and that is a driving fear. You need internet access to utilise the service and internet isn't freely available everywhere whether the obstacle be monetary or physical (Wi-fi signal).
A lot of these fears are however put to rest when you consider how robust the internet actually is. A lot of people now have access to broadband internet. Established businesses such as Spotify will continue to operate so long as their's profit to be had until the next big thing comes to knock it off and when compared to retail stores, the threats to the business seem quite far off.
So for now it seems as if services which offer a subscription to vast libraries are the new establishment. However it's hard to deny how engrained the nature of owning possessions is to our natural spending habits and it's a robust system that's been in existence for as long as trading has occured.
For now I'll view access services as an incredibly attractive experiment, one which I will subscribe to over filling a CD rack with albums.
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