I'm friends with a married couple whom I consider a bit of a guinea pig in terms of the post-early-adopter phase of digital music. They’re a married couple living in NYC (he works at a financial institution, she at an art gallery) and both got iPods last Christmas (so they’re into this whole digital music thing about 1 yr). Observations are:

-They’ve hooked the iPod base directly into the stereo in their apartment using A/V cable. So they use the iPod as the UE/UI to select and play music and only use the stereo to amplify the music.
-She loves purchasing and listening to playlists. She’s purchased Kevin Bacon’s playlist and others from iTMS.
-He still prefers listening to albums.
-Neither had heard of on-demand jukebox services. After describing these to them, she thought it a great idea because she hates having to purchase a track from iTMS after only being able to listen to 30 seconds of it. He felt more comfortable with the notion of owning one’s music.
-Since the beginning of the year, they’ve purchased about $250 worth of downloads from the iTMS (having spent much more on music than they used to).

So, my takeaway given this very unscientific survey is that there is room for various models of music consumption, that the subscription services have a lot of marketing to do, and that the convenience and access of digital music tends to increase one’s “music metabolism” (to use a phrase first heard from Brian Cullinan of Sony).

This reminded me of Strauss Zelnick’s take on all of this during his Jupiter Plug-In keynote. As I recall, he thought that subscription services would have a hard time because $10 to $20 / mo is a lot in terms of discretionary income for most mainstream music consumers, especially if “their music” goes away if they stop their subscription. Do you agree?

[Note: I'll be on out on vacation until 9/8...see you on the other side]