Will Big Music blame their failure on lack of demand?

Six months from now, when the music industry has signed up their first 100 subscribers to their new online services, will they say “there is no demand for paid online music”? I’ll be keeping my eye out for such a quote. The services that are opening up right now, RealOne, PressPlay and AOL MusicNet, are doomed to fail because their usage schemes are insane. I would be willing to pay $10/month to download 100 MP3s.

In fact, I would pay $10/month to download 100 MP3s from 3 of the major labels (since the 5 majors haven’t been able to get behind a common set of services yet)., and another few dollars to get the other two. This is far less convenient than what Napster and Morpheus provide, but it does compensate people involved and would be priced reasonably. I will not pay $10/month for time limited songs that I can’t load on to my Nomad Jukebox or play across our home LAN.