FUTURE VISION ALERT! 🔮
You are just graduating college. You want help finding somewhere to live, but your parents don’t understand. In the teens they rented cute apartments or gross houses with five of their friends. You could do that, you guess. But rentals are kind of old school; subscribing seems way easier. It’s what you do for your phone, it’s how you go to concerts and see movies and get groceries and even how you took some of your college classes. It’s how you stock your closet with clothes and certainly how you’ll furnish your new place, if it’s not already included. Sometimes you do wish you could own something, like they used to, but then the feeling passes and you realize ownership would be a hassle. Subscribing is way better.
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
Since they seem to be here to stay, here are one, two, three of the very best analyses of NFTs I’ve found. • A cute website to help you care for your houseplants. • A thread celebrating the return of the street style queen, Rihanna! • What would happen when the DSA comes for the future Crown Prince of Mars, X Æ A-XII? • An excerpt from Lilly Dancyger’s new memoir. • Bottega Veneta quit social media in January; now they’re back in the digital content game on their own terms. • How does it feel to get rich off your company’s IPO? • And, the impact of the Creator Economy.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
Trend Report: Subscriptions, Memberships, & Partial Ownership | Shawn Cremer | High Noon Original
When Apple released the iPhone 6S in 2015, they introduced a new model of ‘owning’ your phone alongside it: the iPhone Upgrade Program. Prior to 2015, when you wanted a newer iPhone, you could trade in your old one for a nominal discount, but essentially you had to just go buy a new phone, like you did with any products. Sure, people traded in and upgraded their iPhones, but only the Apple heads would do so every year. With the launch of the Upgrade Program, Apple corralled a bigger slice of their customer base into getting a new iPhone every 12 months. The hype leading up to a new iPhone release was followed by garden-variety online gloating by those who traded up and envy from those who didn’t. But with the Upgrade Program, even those who had previously held the opinion (whether honestly or not) that getting a new smartphone every year was a bit ridiculous, became inclined to jump on the train.
Subscriptions have been a commonly-understood concept in the world of publishing for decades. A quick Google NGram evaluation shows a steady rise in the use of the published word “subscription” starting around 1750 and peaking in 1834.
While the same NGram shows a steady decline in the use of the word starting in the 1970s, subscriptions have become ever more ubiquitous, especially in the last decade.
As we all know, Silicon Valley’s fondest concept is disruption. Turning a standard purchase-based business model into a subscription-based business model for a given niche has been a hugely popular tactic of industry disruption. Early on, subscription-model disruption came to industries already firmly planted in the virtual realm — Spotify disrupted our concept of music ownership; Netflix, our relationship to movies — but subscription-based models are now rife in the physical product space as well.
Beyond iPhones, subscription business models have disrupted vitamins, personal grooming (targeting both men and women, and now non-binary folks too), furniture, plants, fashion, groceries, and cleaning supplies. In many cases, multiple companies vie for attention in the same physical goods category.
And we’ve gotten really good at understanding the terms of subscription-based business models as normal and familiar.
When we pay for a “subscription” or a “membership,” we generally have no trouble understanding it as legitimate; it’s as intuitively “real” as when you use your phone to deposit a paycheck and make a credit-card payment.
So where are there still gaps? Real estate is the most obvious category where subscription-based models haven’t really caught on. While “subscriptions” to commercial real estate, in the form of memberships to companies like WeWork, Soho House, and The Wing, do exist, the subscription-based living model hasn’t yet hit it big in the private real estate space.
But it’s coming.
In the same way that the Coronavirus pandemic will have lasting effects on the MPC worker’s relationship to the office, it will also change how people view possible housing scenarios. In the 2010s, the “digital nomad” — a term coined by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manner in 1997 — rose to semi-prominence as a caricature of an itinerant millennial worker, often a self-employed or freelance one who travelled the world, often combining their employer’s work with self-promotional content creation, such as blogging, vlogging, or Instagramming. For the most part, these digital nomads made do with sublets, long-term AirBnB rentals, hostels, or a smattering of communal housing options specifically set up for their kind.
As with many other trends, one outcome of the pandemic will be to accelerate the trend toward the development of a secondary economy supporting the lifestyle of digital nomads. As more people realize they don’t have to go into an office, or even live in one place all year, the disruption of the standard rental market by a subscription-based model seems obvious.
A graphic designer for a design agency need not remain in New York. She might live there three months of the year, another three in Marrakech, Copenhagen for a quarter, and the remaining months back in her home city of Melbourne. She can do this because she doesn’t have a year-long lease to worry about. She subscribes to housing at a pre-selected cost and luxury level and has the ability to live in any of the global cities where the subscription service offers apartments.
During the last two decades, ownership has been bifurcating into two categories: partial ownership (the investment model) and abdication of ownership (the subscription model). By the end of the next two, it will be more common to subscribe to products, big and small, than to own them.
Experience
^Click^ to spend some time with the immersive Issued by Bottega zine.
Cheers
🌺 Mix up a tropical cocktail this week as we edge toward a real spring! 🌺