Have you noticed we can’t actually buy a lot of stuff right now? And it really, really annoys me.
As I mentioned in a piece a few days ago, back in January we purchased a BYD Atto 2 EV to complement my mighty 2003 Monaro I have had from new.
The Monaro originally had a Blaupunkt premium sound system in it with a 5 CD stacker, but a few years back I swapped that out for a Pioneer Head Unit with Wayze, and Android Auto etc.
The Atto 2 comes standard with such a system and accessed by the on-board tablet.
Over the years, I have garnered quite a collection of records, CDs and DVDs – the records mostly purchased but a fair few obtained during my stint as PR at CBS Records before Sony Music bought them out.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, and I am surprised I had not thought of it before, all those CDs, whilst not totally redundant as I have a CD/DVD player as a part of my home sound / video system, cannot be played in either car?
Whenever I bought a new album (record), I always bought the CD to do just that, play it in the car. But that is now impossible. Spotify has taken over pretty much.
So, as well as having coughed up for the CD, and I am also paying Spotify to duplicate the ability to listen to my favourite tracks. Which I have already bought – well technically, purchased a licence to play in perpetuity.
(And as an aside, the artists get a % from the CD but less than a flea bite from Spotify).
What Can’t We Buy Anymore?
It got me thinking. What else did we used to buy that we can no longer, in the majority of cases, do so?
The obvious one as I say is music, but software would be a close second for many.
I well remember the days when Microsoft Office around $1200 outright or you could buy Word or Excel etc separately for $735 per program and you only upgraded to later versions if you wanted to. AND you got a proper paper bound manual.
The same applies to Adobe with Premiere Pro or After Effects for example.
Those days are long gone, but software is not the only category where vendors have decided subscriptions are a great idea (as they run their hands together in glee).
Games are now almost all subscription only, and Sony at least is eliminating the choice of buying the actual media. And lately, it has come to my attention that smart home devices such as the Ring Doorbell or Google’s Nest products charge you for storing the data they capture on your behalf.
Go outside of IT as such and fitness has become somewhat of a rort – sorry – subscription business. The Peloton bike I understand you buy, but you need to pay a subscription for the ongoing classes and content. Even the humble newspaper has to be paid for in advance unless you fancy a daily trip to the newsagency – home deliveries which for many a teenage kid, yours truly included, was his or her first attempt at earning a quid from a job, are also long gone.
The common thread across almost all of these is companies converting what used to be a one-time transaction into recurring revenue, often bundled with cloud storage, continuous updates, or exclusive content that didn’t exist in the “ownership” model.
There are obvious downsides to the software situation; what if you are halfway through building a 3D model in Cinema 4D for example and your subscription lapses. This makes it impossible to continue the project until it is re-subscribed causing expensive downtime.
Is It Here To Stay?
Do I think the subscription model is now so ingrained it is here to stay?
There is no doubt that it is a cash cow for the vendors; how much do you spend on subscriptions to Spotify, Prime, Netflix, Britbox, Disney and so forth and so on, and every month as each comes out of your bank account you swear that this time you’ll cancel it.
No-one I know likes the concept, and there is a groundswell slowly starting to build it appears.
Some things are quite valid and useful I agree – Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive for example, as they reduce the onus on the user to do physical backups of data.
But on the other side of the coin, a recent backlash against Adobe’s terms and conditions that caused a bit of backpedalling, means consumers are starting to realise this is not the way they want the future to be and some give and take needs be included, and not have everything the vendor’s way.
Subscription Fatigue
Apparently, “subscription fatigue” is a genuinely measurable consumer phenomenon these days; people are actively auditing and cancelling subscriptions, which is a different psychological posture than five years ago when it was just accepted as “how software works now”.
The ongoing success of Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve software shows that a hybrid model – leading people to look at BMD’s other products to bring them into the ecosphere – is a good example of thinking outside the subscription box.
Conclusion
My best guess is that the market will split in that the subscription model will stay, but there will be ways to allow you to purchase. But I’ll bet the cost of getting upgrades and patches may make it an unattractive option.
Having said that, right-to-repair and “right to own digital purchases” movements are gaining legislative traction in places like the EU, which could eventually force some unbundling of subscription-gated features from hardware you’ve already paid for.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.