According to Billboard Magazine, the average broadband ISP loses about 1.4% of their customers per month (aka churn), 14.5% annually, or over 2.1 million customers each year. Comcast for example, with their average customer paying $43 per month, stands to lose $1.1 billion lost from churn every year. How do you keep those customers around? Billboard proposes that by tying consumers to a streaming music service, ISPs could reduce that churn substantially:Of course this is the broadband industry we're talking about. As carriers have stripped services away from subscribers (like newsgroup access), they haven't been replacing them with a whole lot of added value services. Instead, over the last few years the industry has taken a page from the wireless industry and started signing users to long term contracts and imposing early termination fees (ETFs) to force people into sticking around.

While a music subscription service might please some users, Wired News worries that tie your music to one particular ISP with DRM, making them annoying to the consumer. If add-on subscription music services are going to work, they're going to need to be good -- and add value, argues Wired:Comcast is rumored to be working on one such service for $5 or more a month, though the details remain scarce. Also at play as ISPs consider these services is the recording industry's desire to impose a monthly surcharge to all broadband subscribers for access to music -- whether they want to make the choice or not. Whether these services are mandatory, whether it's a free value-added service, and whether they're loaded with DRM tying the user's catalog to one ISP -- will make all the difference in the world.