The article about the “subscription” HP ink made me realise something.
Subscriptions aren’t a new idea at all. You could subscribe to paper magazines. And you got to keep them.
I’m just clearing up my old house and it’s filled with tons of old tech magazines. Lots of useful knowledge here. Wanna know how Windows and Mac compared in 1993? It’s in here. All the forgotten technologies? Old games, old phones, whatever? You’ll find it.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
But still, the very definition of subscription has shifted. Now, the common meaning is “you only get to use these things as long as you’re paying”. Nobody even thinks it could mean anything else.
Besides, it doesn’t only apply to services that offer entire libraries. Online magazines still exist in a similar form as the paper ones. But you only get to access them while your “subscription” is active. Even the stuff you had while you were paying.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them. The online and streaming stuff of today and tomorrow? In 30 years it’ll be gone, forgotten and inaccessible.
Another thing about subscriptions now is the part about “saving money.” It used to be that you got a real discount on magazines if you subscribed to them. The idea was to pay more up front now but pay less money per issue. Online subscriptions try to convince the consumer that it’s cheaper to subscribe to a streaming, gaming, or e-book service because you have the entire catalog at your disposal. The problem is that you’re not really saving any money. You won’t be interested in using the entire catalog, only a few items from the catalog. I’m not going to read all the terrible books on KindleUnlimited, for example. This is also a flat-out lie. Items get removed from the catalog all the time. Netflix, KindleUnlimited, Xbox, et. al. don’t keep things there indefinitely. It’s also important to consider how things you might want to use are not in the catalog, so you’d have to pay the subscription fee plus buy an item that isn’t in the catalog. In the end, it’s all more money for the company and less money for the consumer to save.