If someone were to want to go out and start a similarly-sized collection, that would be a lot of money right there. Even if you were to buy all of them them used (call it $2 a CD), that’s an outlay of $2000! I haven’t factored sales tax or VAT into that yet, but that’s ok. Between you and your friends, it goes up to around $4000. Now, if you suggest selling the CDs after ripping them, then you might as well go ahead and fire up BitTorrent, Limewire, or your other favorite file sharing software.

Going the Amazon/iTunes/Rhapsody/Zune store route, let’s say out of those 12000 songs, there were only 1000 that you really liked. At a dollar per song, that’s still $1000!

What exactly does $1000 get you in terms of subscription services? Well, it would give you about 67 months of Rhapsody or Zune service (remember, you also get 67*10 = 670 songs to keep on Zune); double that for your and Elana’s collection = 10 YEARS.

But wait, why stop at Rhapsody? Pandora’s and Last.fm subscription services (which lets you have unlimited skips) are $3/month each. That’s more than 25 YEARS of service! True, rates can go up, but still… geez. Pandora and Last.fm don’t let you do offline listening? Also true. However, Slacker Radio does; they’re $4/month. That’ll get you more than 20 years of time there, and they have all sorts of neat mixes and recommendation tools. And if you like, you can even subscribe to BOTH services and still get 10 years of music! Not 12000 or 24000 songs, or even 25*(average number of unduplicated songs between all your friends) – but MILLIONS.

When you terminate the service, you’re left with no music? Yes – but at $3-4, why would you want to stop? It’s the cost of buying a new CD every 3 or 4 months, or one used one each month! I’m plenty happy to pay $3/mo to Pandora, especially since you get 192kbps streams. So, yes, if you were already saddled by large amounts of plastic or vinyl, subscription services might not hold much for you – if you never intend to spend another dime on music again and never want to listen to another new song.

PS: If Simplify got really popular all of sudden, do you really think the RIAAs of the world wouldn’t say a word (not saying they would have merit, but that they would try to stymie the company)?

Not only because (hopefully) a higher level of gear-conversing takes place here on GD but because THAT is an awesome model. I recall hearing about it when it initially launched but totally forgot about it. A model like that would make me consider an iTunes subscription!

Neither subscriptions nor streaming are for everyone, but for my money, I’d probably lean towards the Pass just because I have a Zune and it would make more sense for me at this time.

I’ve read about folks like that … but never met any