In the current academic setting I am in this product has not been requested. However, as a local taxpayer and public library user I think this is an unfair use of the public library budget. The public library would not purchase a book for me that couldn’t be read by others, electronic or print. Why should music be any different.

As individuals we may not use everything the public library has to offer, but every item they purchase should be available to all.

I can think of so many different ways to say this…

Thank you for your very illuminating blog post! I had no idea what the cost would be for us to subscribe to a service like this, but doubtless the cost would far exceed what we have available in our very slim e-resources budget. I am also wary of any vendor whose web presence consists of a single page. (?) I also fear that opening up lines of communication with a sales rep would make me prey for cold calls and — even worse — cold visits that I would need to fend off.

Since I have no idea if I will hit the limits of the Freegal service for myself, I am enjoying it on my new Android mobile device that had no music content downloaded to it. My library of downloads will grow over time. Sometimes, it is not possible to download every song from an artist either, so I find that acceptable as well since it ensures that fans of an artist will still be purchasing digital albums occasionally. The Seattle Public Library uses other e-sources for music as well, such as Hoopla, and while I can instantly access entire albums through that service (I’ve borrowed around eight this past week), the extent of the hoopla library is far more limited. I have browsed through nearly the entire New Age genre in the past week and have found only two albums that I would consider Favorites and only a handful of others that I would even want to listen to again.

Working in the game industry, I have been a strong anti-pirate advocate for many years now, but one thing that I have always found disconcerting about free music services is that, when they have too much content available, what is to keep the consumer from just continuing to discover new content rather than settling on favorite artists? I had downloaded hundreds of hours of MP3s in the ambient genre from MP3.com’s initial heyday, and I had only made it to the letter “C” in all of the artists that fell into that category before the service was taken offline and revamped with a lot less free content. Buying content can be limited by garden sites too, such as my purchases from iTunes: iTunes definitely does not have all of the available content for some artists. Then I’m limited to sources like Amazon to track down actual physical copies for purchase when libraries fail me.

So my initial impression of Freegal is that it’s part of a spectrum of e-services that anyone with a participating library can avail themselves of. That Freegal has the Sony record label content is its saving grace. There are pay services that would not interest me as much as Freegal if it were a pay service for customers because of this. In the early days of eMusic, for example, most of its music was from independent artists and labels and not really in genres in which I am interested.

“Why are we buying pay-per-use MP3s?
I believe that without really thinking it through, libraries who have subscribed to Freegal have created a fundamental change in their library’s collection policy and expenditures.

**Libraries typically buy one copy of something, and then lend it out to multiple users sequentially, in order to get a good return on investment. Participating in a product like Freegal means that we’re not lending anymore, we’re buying content for users to own permanently so they don’t have to pay the vendor directly themselves. This puts us in direct competition with the vendor’s sales directly to consumers, and the vendors will never make more money off of libraries than they will off of direct consumer sales.

What that does is put libraries in a position of being economic victims of our own success. I would think that libraries would remember this lesson from our difficulties with the FirstSearch pay-per-use model that most of us found to be unsustainable.

The more popular our service gets, the less able we are to meet demand. The private industry is moving away from pay-per-use. Netflix, Rdio, etc. are offering all-you-can-eat models instead on a subscription model. Freegal puts us in danger of manufacturing a demand we can no longer meet. The pay-per-use model undermines the economic power of libraries, which is to aggregate our communities’ buying power and take advantage of the economies of scale. I believe strongly that buying a product like Freegal could be damaging to libraries’ long-term economic sustainability.”

Ps. Sorry about the typos in my most previous post to this one.