Selling music online is an interesting business. So many people have tried their hands at it with so many different approaches… iTunes and Zune were revolutionary. They freed good music tracks from the otherwise mediocre albums. iTunes pioneered this model. Zune went a step further and made it easy for people to access millions of tracks via subscriptions.

There are more such models in the wild. Just heard about Lala which has yet another business model around selling music. Two novel approaches here. 1. Lala let’s you listen to your offline music collection from any browser and 2. Lala allows you to purchase a track for listening online for 10 cents. This is one interesting approach to deregulating copy that Lessig suggested.

There’s one approach that I want someone to try out. It’s music rental. My theory is that a music track has shelf life. You’d hardly hear current chart toppers a few months down the line. Artists and trends come and go. J Lo and Shakira were popular a few years ago so why do people have sunk cost in their songs today? Particularly if they hardly ever listen to them these days.

There are very few tracks that you’d perpetually own and would listen to over and over again. For all other tracks, it makes sense to rent them for a friction of the purchase price and let the DRM expire the track after some time say a year. If I want to own the track for long haul, I can always own it DRM free. This will let me explore a lot of music without having to commit to 15$ per month or spending a dollar a track. This will also let me play all the music that is currently hot without having to pay a lot of money for it.

Restrictive measures against piracy should not prohibit people from exploring music and developing their taste.