Dog the Bounty Hunter: definitely orange.

If your customers are trying to get oranges, what’s the use in telling them no and trying to sell them apples? People who download music illegally are trying to get oranges - they see DRM encoded, subscription based, not-entirely-compatible with your mp3 player-mp3 files as apples. This is why they upset the apple cart in the record business.

There’s a good piece on the pirate’s dilemma facing the record business on the BBC news website this morning. Legendary producer and Columbia co-chairman Rick Rubin is now talking about selling oranges. He’s supporting the monthly subscription model for buying music. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 (£10) a month, and the music will come from anywhere you’d like,” he told The New York Times.

But as David Pakman, the boss of emusic, pointed out to the BBC, “Per capita spending on music in the US in 2005 was $24 a year,” he says. “Music as a utility would pre-suppose that Americans are prepared to spend more on music than they did then, but speculation is that it’s somewhat less than that now.”

Pakman makes a good point, but the problem isn’t with the model, the problem is with the price. $24 a month is probably a little expensive, but maybe $2 a month, or $5 a month, or even $10 a month isn’t. Let’s pre-suppose people spend less on music, as Pakman suggests, but let’s also assume that people are consuming music in more ways, through more devices, than ever before, because they are. We can access high quality, digital recordings through phones, computers, Dog the Bounty Hunters sunglasses and even our swiss army knives.

The message from consumers over the last decade couldn’t be clearer - people want to use music any way they see fit, and that’s exactly what they are doing. But the labels have responded by (trying) to make it harder for this to happen (the BBC article above also mentions that Sony just scrapped its entire digital music strategy). If a music-as-utility monthly subscription model was introduced in the U.S. that made it ridiculously easy for music to spread as far and wide as possible, I’m talking easier than a Torrent, DRM-free, high quality mp3s for say, $4 a month, the record industry would be onto something.

It may well be the case that as well as attracting the majority of the current record buying public, many new consumers would sign up who don’t spend $24 a year on music, because suddenly the legit music business, for the first time, would be offering a better product than illegal file-sharing. $4 isn’t a lot of money for all the free music you can shake an iPod at, but if the amount of people who buy music at current levels signed up, the U.S. music industry’s annual revenue would double in size.

Given the current situation, surely this model has to be worth looking at?