Digital downloads are gradually taking over from physical CD sales. Apple’s iTunes is now jostling with Wal-Mart for the title of No.1 music retailer in the US, while Australians legally downloaded 788,000 albums and 17.6 million individual tracks in 2007.

Factor in the millions more songs that were downloaded or swapped illegally and digital downloads are gradually closing in on the 44 million CDs Aussies bought last year.

But are the days of digital downloads themselves numbered? Subscription music services offer a different way for fans to get their music fix, and the first one to be available in Australia just launched in the shape of the Nokia Music Store.

Instead of buying individual songs or albums, subscription services let you listen to everything in the store, as often as you like, for a flat monthly fee. It’s a model known as the “celestial jukebox” where you never buy a record but get to listen to everything – or almost everything – ever recorded as long as you keep paying your dues.

We rent movies, so why not rent music, too? Because it’s not in our nature, according to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. A self-confessed Beatles tragic, Jobs argues that we may only watch a movie once in our lifetime, but a favourite album can receive a thousand spins and our emotional attachment to the music means we want to own it, too.

Jobs has a vested interest in such an argument as iTunes doesn’t (yet) offer a subscription model, but he has a point. Music fans of a certain age have an almost fetishistic attachment to the physical media their tunes come on. Vinyl junkies still rue the move from LPs to compact discs, while others resist making the switch from cold hard CDs to ephemeral downloads.

But that attachment is fading. I used to covet vinyl. I used to show off my CD collection. Now I’ve switched to downloads, sick of buying a CD only to rip it and file it away in a cupboard.