Are Subscription Music Services Doomed?

Best Buy sure doesn’t hope so, because they just dropped $121 million on the mainly-subscription Napster online music service. But Fortune asks a good question: will subscription music services ever catch on with mainstream music listeners, or are they just doomed?

So far the answer is a resounding “who cares.” After years of being on the market in its legal reincarnation, Napster only has about 700,000 subscribers. Most consumers simply don’t want to rent music, even if a fee of $10 to $15 per month gives them access to millions of tracks from the major labels.

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