Wednesday, October 06, 2004

It's time for a change. I'm ready to rent, not own. After years collecting hundreds of vinyl LPs, CDs, and DVDs—and a couple hundred hours ripping, reripping, transferring, and backing up—I'm not sure it's worth the hassle. Not when you can tithe Apple, CinemaNow, Microsoft, and Napster a few dollars every month and have all the entertainment you want.

For someone who's always thought it better to own a house than rent a condo, to buy a car outright than make lease payments for the rest of your life, this is a big change. Maybe you should think about it too. The cost of ownership includes the cost of the CD and DVD discs, replacements for the ones you break or lose, plus the time frittered away dealing with lookups, listings, backups, and transcoding.

The more CDs and DVDs you own, the more you realize how much entertainment you're missing. That's reinforced if you have 120 channels of Sirius or XM Satellite Radio in your car, a Napster or Rhapsody music stream at home, or even the digital music channels on cable and satellite TV. For $10 a month, you can have all the music you want at moderate fidelity (few of us stop to listen to music critically). And for another $5 a month, you can stream as much of it as you want to a portable music player. If you buy 100 CDs, you'll spend $1,500. The same investment applied to renting your tunes could carry you and your music player through the next decade. And you wouldn't be stuck with a physical copy of Brother Sun, Sister Moon unto eternity.

Don't toss your DVD player just yet. But do give serious thought to whether you should rent or own your music in the future. The wave of technology arriving this fall with the next generation of Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs and linked digital media hubs, called Media Center Extenders (if they're Media Center-specific), will make rental even more tempting.