The nice thing about subscription service is that you're never in danger of losing your music. You're not locked into a specific codec, audio quality, or player.
If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
I'm not claiming that it's perfect for everyone, it's a personal choice: you can get all of the music now but have to keep paying, or you can slowly build up a library but start out with not much.
The other advantage of subscription is that you can easily try out new music. It's incredibly easy to discover new music when it's all in one catalog and there's no marginal cost of listening to entire CDs.
The only problem is that switching from one model to the other is going to be painful--but this isn't an advantage either way.
> You're not locked into a specific codec, audio quality, or player.
You're not locked into a specific player with mp3 audio either, and IIRC there aren't any subscription services that give you mp3 audio... so you are limited in your choices of music player in the first place since subscription services all use some form of DRM.
If you buy CD audio, or are able to find a service that sells FLAC/APE/ALAC audio, then you're also not 'locked in' to a particular codec or audio quality (because at that level you can easily transcode downwards in quality and/or to lossy codecs).
> If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
This is assuming that the subscription services use compatible DRM schemes, or that your player supports both DRM schemes... Otherwise you're stuck needing to buy a new player. And that's not to mention any time and effort that you put into building custom playlists that won't transfer to the new subscription service.
It's sort of like all the personal information that people put into Facebook. They are investing a lot of time into one vendor of social networking services. The more time that they spend on Facebook, the more heavily invested they are in staying with that particular vendor, because it becomes more and more painful to rebuild all of your information/connections/etc on the new service.
If the service or technology went down, you're not out anything--you just move to a new subscription service.
I'm not claiming that it's perfect for everyone, it's a personal choice: you can get all of the music now but have to keep paying, or you can slowly build up a library but start out with not much.
The other advantage of subscription is that you can easily try out new music. It's incredibly easy to discover new music when it's all in one catalog and there's no marginal cost of listening to entire CDs.
The only problem is that switching from one model to the other is going to be painful--but this isn't an advantage either way.