Further to our successful blog post on The End of Ownership, John Warrillow proposes an interesting alternate view on the development of the Subscription Economy.
Increasingly, successful companies propose to clients to pay a subscription instead of buying individual items. John identifies 5 main business types associated with a subscription business model:
flat fee to access an unlimited library of content,- sampling boxes,
- automatic replenishment of consumables,
- monitoring (e.g. antivirus etc),
- reporting – access to information.
The most interesting evolution lies in the first type. Unlimited libraries of content have only been made possible through the Fourth Revolution. It looks increasingly like subscription is the model of the future for access to cultural and artistic products, leveraged by powerful algorithms that suggest further products based on what you have been using. It is the typical model of Netflix for video, and it seems that Amazon and online music broadcasters increasingly tend towards this model.
For example, Amazon Kindle proposes a program where customers can borrow titles and authors get compensated from an Amazon pot, proportionally to the popularity of their books.
Hence, not only do we own less and rent more, but the rent increasingly looks like a flat fee for a service, relatively independent of the usage intensity. A great business model that will further reinforce our dependence on rental.
