Steam is the classical rebuke to this. It's a store for pay-once products, with minimal (trivially by passable) drm, and it's immensely popular.
Re:Bye, Prime
by netdevphoenix on Friday March 07, 2025 @06:42AM
(#43289384)
Steam is the exception that confirms the rule.
Mainstream movies and music are fast food. Made fast and consumed fast. They have a very short shelf life and new songs/movies come out every 2 weeks or so which is an order of magnitude faster than games. Games take longer to play and many have a high replayability factor so you can justify a one off pay.
Essentially you are buying hundreds of hours of experience vs 2 hours of experience watching a movie or 3 minutes listening to a song. And unlike games, movies and songs are literally the same no matter how many times you play them. If you look at games that can be completed in a few hours by casual players, you will see that the pay is extremely low.
But a bicycle is a physical object that can't be replicated at no cost. Digital representations of songs can.
A world where music can be purchased once is a world where piracy obliterates that business model. Piracy will unfortunately always be easier than buying the song. You lose the song? You pirate it again. If you buy it, you need log in to some website and download the song. If you lose the creds, you need to reset, log in and download the song. Lost your email account? Now you need to liase with a human on the customer service team. With piracy, the answer is always "just download the file.".
Streaming simplifies this and adds additional functionality that makes it much easier than piracy by allowing you to search for songs easily, suggesting songs to you, letting you make playlists and adding the social element.