More Mobile Tunes — For a Fee: "Tired of being stuck with only a handful of local AM and FM radio stations? Two companies, XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio, are trying to give listeners more choices. Both companies broadcast 100 channels of music — ranging from heavy metal rock to Mozart — and other audio content from Earth orbiting satellites using a digital signal. That means each station is available coast-to-coast across the U.S. and in static-free clarity. The catch? Listeners have to buy new radio receivers and pay a monthly subscription fee."

It's interesting to see that the effort to convert free users (who pays for radio today?) to paying customers is not limited to the online space. Like cable TV, satellite radio proponents are offering more choice (and probably less advertising carpet bombing) than their traditional competitors. Sat radio also brings better quality and coverage (no more static in the middle of a song you love when you drive out of range).

What's distrubing is that we're still being sold based on transport means and distribution channels, not the content itself. We're asked to choose among physical products (CDs, DVDs), various Internet services, (cable or sat) TV, (FM or sat) radio, and have to compute what's most adapted to our needs and lifestyle (are you sedentary or do you move a lot, do you listen to music while working on the PC or when you shower, ...). Meanwhile, we just care about the music, but the bill would come to an absurd amount were we to subscribe to all the services that cater to all the different scenarios (ie. we listen to music on our PCs, in our cars, at our friends' places, ...). So we're left with choosing the best compromise.

I often get the feeling that subscription services are offered as if the consumer was in a vacuum, not a broad marketplace where overlapping services abound. Ah, but it takes time for an industry to reorganize its whole value chain (especially when powerful players are reluctant to let go their grasp of the market).