> Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment

But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc).

> Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.

Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else.

The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them.

However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there.

In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger.

What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there).

News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.