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]

So, I just had to laugh when our designer (the attractive and talented Stephen Blake) came up with the graphic for this story:

http://mp3.com/story/feature_matchoo2.html

I think today was a record on the number of people who emailed me the story, and I realized this afternoon that I don't really know what to think. It was inevitable, I suppose, and we have all known that Yahoo was going to open a store ever since they posted a job for a Product Manager for a Digital Music Store. I think Elliot has a good tack on the unseen angle here… the dreaded name that strikes fear into all audio software developers… Thomson! I remember when I was working on a media player (remember Sonique anyone?), and my jaw dropped when I found out how much you had to pay Thomson per install – - its good to own patents. As far as the future… hard to say. Merging two companies/technologies can be a big head-ache, but Yahoo has done it before. Was the price too high? Maybe… but its all about leverage… last time I checked Launch was the second biggest music site on the web.