Wow, I'm still somewhat shocked that there are people who believe that subscriptions are the answer. The problem is marketing. Rhapsody (and formally Yahoo!) doesn't know how to properly market the service. Yahoo! Music is the number 1 music site on the Web. If they can't market a music service I'm not sure who can. Still I even heard from one of the smartest guys in the industry that if Apple would offer subscriptions as part of iTunes that will be that, subscriptions will come of age.

Sure. Apple might increase subscriptions, but only a small fraction of people (possibly even myself if the price is right) will ever choose to have subscriptions. The reason subscriptions are only popular with a small fraction of people is not due to lack of marketing it's a result of PURE economics.

I wrote about this 3 years ago in a post called, Why Music Subscritions Fail:

"Having [a music subscription service] tell me I have 1 million songs at my finger tips for $9.95/month is irrelevant. I will never listen to a million or even 100 thousand different songs in my life time. And I only have the capacity IF I am lucky to discover 100 new songs that I like and will listen to more than once this year.

So a subscription model will cost me about 120 dollars during that year for those 100 NEW songs. And I have to pay again for them next year unless I discover another 100 NEW songs I like. So as a rational person, I would rather pay for the 100 NEW songs once for a total cost of about 100 dollars.

Now if the subscription model was less than 100 dollars you have me interested, but forget about my wife as a customer. She discovers about 3 new songs a year that she likes, so the subscription for her better be under 3 bucks."

It is also for the very same reason that imposing a flat tax/levy on ISPs and subsequently on all users regardless of their music listening habits would be viewed as EXTREMELY unfair taxation and doomed to kill any government which tried to levy it. I believe that the only acceptable levy would be so close to the margins (cost of delivery) that very little/meaningful money at all would ever make it back to an actual artist. In that situation what would be the purpose of the levy again?