Here in Korean market, streaming service dominates. Many iPhone users have not even used iTunes. Why? $5/month music service gives you access to most K pops. Thats it. $5/month subscription for most musics. Depending on market conditions, a little lower priced downloading seems pointless
But I use iTunes (iradio) as i have U.S. Account.
Streaming is going to dominate the US market, too. Between Netflix and Spotify, iTunes is in serious trouble. It's not clear to me that Apple has a viable response---iTV seems to be in limbo, and iTunes Match seems like window dressing. Apple bought some time for the old music publishing model but that time is running out.
To an extent, iTunes has done what it needed to do; it helped make iPods and then iPhones viable. By all reports, it's pretty low-margin (for a while, it was apparently negative margin), and was more about selling the devices than anything else.
Spotify is very popular in Europe, I really wonder why people still buy albums when you can get access to a huge catalogue for a relatively small monthly fee. Of course some albums are not available but I guess it will improve over time.
It's also trivial to automatically rip streamed tracks (with song, artist, album info). It took about 5 min each to scrape info from rhapsody, rdio, spotify, etc or there are existing tools to do this.
These people on "hacker" news concerned over price aren't very good hackers or are too milk-toast to be hackers. Maybe y'all need a few "how to rip music in Go" posts?
Even with Amazon you are still throwing your money away buying music at $1/song.
