You are living in the past on several of these issues. For one, Sony's players have supported mp3 for at least the past 3 years and possibly longer. Second, options like Microsoft's Zune Pass let you do both: paying $15/month gets you access to the entire catalog of music, but you get to keep 10 of the tracks (in a no DRM, quality mp3 format for most songs) every month -- making it equivalent to only paying around $6/month for the subscription.
> For one, Sony's players have supported mp3 for at least the past 3 years and possibly longer.
Last time I checked they said that players 'supported mp3', but what that really meant is that you had to use their software to load music onto the player, and their software transcoded from mp3 -> ATRAC. They just don't announce it outright that internally the player is using ATRAC.
> Second, options like Microsoft's Zune Pass let you do both: paying $15/month gets you access to the entire catalog of music, but you get to keep 10 of the tracks (in a no DRM, quality mp3 format for most songs) every month -- making it equivalent to only paying around $6/month for the subscription.
In that case, it's not really a 'subscription service' but a hybrid 'subscription/pay-to-own service.' More like a 'rent-to-own' service. {edit} Not to mention that Zune is Windows-only. {/edit}
