John Buckman from Magnatune announced today a change in their business model: they're moving away from the sales of individual albums, and fully embracing a no-limits subscription model. For one monthly subscription price, users get unlimited access to their music catalog.

The fact that a relatively small player like Magnatune can get away with this at prices competitive with Rhapsody and other music services with millions of popular songs is a powerful affirmation of what today's music consumers really want. And in fact, Buckman states their data conclusively suggested that, when users were presented with a "pay-what-you-will" per-album model vs. a flat rate subscription model, users overwhelmingly went for the subscription.

There are some other changes as well. They're phasing out physical media (CDs) altogether, and they're going to be moving their commercial licensing features to its own website, which should lead to a less cluttered / better focused Magnatune.com website.

But it's the subscription model that makes me think of Moviestorm's recent analogous business changes. They've shifted away from sales of individual content packs in favor of a subscription service a la Netflix. In some ways, this move by a company with Magnatune's reputation has to be a bit of an affirmation for the Moviestorm crew regarding their recent changes.

Some Differences

One difference between Moviestorm's approach and Magnatune / Netflix is the "unlimited" feature of the latter two. Moviestorm still has a "limiter" in place with their points system, meaning that to truly obtain full access to all of Moviestorm's "catalog" without waiting for points to accrue, users may have to invest a bit more money to "top off" their points and acquire content more quickly. By contrast, Magnatune will offer unrestrained downloading if I'm understanding it correctly, and I know for a fact that Netflix streaming is unlimited (albeit the catalog available for streaming is limited in some ways, but the quantity of choices is so high that one would hardly notice).

I don't think, however, that the download limit issue is the most significant contrast to draw between Magnatune's approach and Moviestorm's. Moviestorm can lift that limit in the future but there will still be a major difference: Magnatune isn't the one producing their content; Moviestorm, for the most part, is. Can you imagine how less often we'd get email updates from Magnatune about new music if the only people producing the music were Magnatune employees? And would we ever see the kind of variety present in Magnatune's catalog if the creators group were so limited in size / geography?

Now with me being the first Moviestorm user to release a commercial content pack, and also being well aware of the growing body of free content being offered up by other users, I know that not all Moviestorm content is created by Moviestorm. But there are some types of content - some very VERY important types of content - which are not being created by people outside of Moviestorm's own offices. Most notably, characters and animations. And there's a very good reason we, the userbase, aren't creating these. We pretty much can't.

The Cal3d Underpinnings

Under the hood, Moviestorm uses Cal3d, an open source model/animation architecture, as its technical model for assets. The plus of this is that it's open source. Moviestorm's character skeleton is a custom one of their own devising, suited specifically to the kind of movement and detail they wanted their program to have. This is precisely in alignment with the purpose behind Cal3d; it allows tremendous freedom for developers to not be bound by any preexisting standards or limits.

But the problem is, this skeleton information has not been made available to would-be Moviestorm content creators. And without the skeleton, you haven't a prayer of creating a character, and you've no way to rig it for animation. Oh sure, a skilled practitioner could probably reverse engineer the binary mesh and animation files distributed with Moviestorm to uncover these secrets - but that's a violation of the EULA so what sort of effect would have have on any future attempt to monetize the resulting creations?

So why not just ask?

A couple years ago, I asked Moviestorm about getting access to the skeleton and other basic information we'd need to create / animate our own Moviestorm characters. The unofficial argument presented to me at the time was that Moviestorm didn't know if it was a good idea to open that door because a significant portion of their income depended on sales of their own content packs, so they needed to keep some exclusivity on at least some of the assets so they'd generate the revenue to stay in business, etc. And you know what? I agreed with the assessment. I did suggest that the way Moviestorm could best keep on top of the game was to be the ones releasing the really premium quality content, leveraging design resources and skills that users out here were less likely to have. But all in all, I relented in my request because I could see a logic to it.

Things have changed. Moviestorm's new subscription model evaporates this old reason for withholding the info. A Moviestorm subscription is required to make use of ANY third-party content, whether free or commercial. So not only does Moviestorm no longer have reason to fear / oppose that third-party content (including characters and animations), in fact it now has a direct business reason to actively support the creation of that content. The third party creation of that content is, in fact, adding value to their own product. That was hard to argue under the old model, but it's indisputable now. If we, the users, are allowed to create appealing content, Moviestorm benefits because no one can use it unless they first establish a transaction with Moviestorm.

The way things stand right now, however, it's a bit like if Magnatune signed up music artists from around the world, invited them to create content which it would help them sell, but then made the stipulation that the only stringed instruments which could be used were the ones housed in Magnatune's Los Angeles office - and played by a Magnatune employee.

What I Believe

I believe it is in Moviestorm's direct financial interest, and in the best interest of all of its users, to enable and directly encourage skilled content creators to model, skin, and animate their own characters, adding to the worldwide human and non-human cast available in the Moviestorm software. I believe the best way they can do this is by releasing the schematics for these content types, and releasing some basic information about how the Moviestorm program plugs them in (esp. animations). If you feel the same way, hop over to the Moviestorm modding forum and make yourself heard on the subject.

What do you think? The analogy I draw above is imperfect, but does it hold water?