milosevic - 4:57 pm on Jan 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

Because as soon as you stop paying the 9/month you don't have those songs anymore.

Exactly - I will never get into one of these monthly payment things because if you stop paying, you lose your music collection, and they often use vendor lock in tricks to make leaving an extremely unattractive proposition, that you aren't made aware of before signing up.

Many of the digital download services are the same as streaming sites in terms of vendor lock in, I'm sure we've all heard things about itunes and Apple products.

I stopped downloading tv shows from bit torrent (I don't really watch many films nowadays at all) and started watching them on streaming sites. But I'm aware that when I go away travelling, I'm going to lose all that unless I'm permanently staying somewhere with decent broadband, which will be almost never in many countries. I feel like some of these cloud services are going to create a generation of 'cloud prisoners' who are afraid to leave the safety of their home broadband connection for things like travel, particularly with increasing moves towards regional lock ins.

Traditional media doesn't fare much better, I lived in New Zealand for several years and my hypothetical DVD collection would have been coasters there, just because I went to a different country that's in a different region.