Because companies make their best and most reliable income from subscriptions.

Because they seemed like a good deal when they first came around, and they were, so they boomed in popularity. Then everyone started offering them, the prices got jacked up and now you'll struggle to find an alternative.

Also, the very very short answer: More money

It's a lot easier and much much cheaper to run a subscription payment model today than it was 10-20 years ago.

'recurring revenue streams'. businesses can make more money selling products as services than actual things, and more reliably.

take adobe licensing as a perfect example of this enshitification.

Adobe opened the floodgates and it's been downhill since

C A P I T A L I S M

Once they proved that people would be willing to pay repeatedly, everyone wanted a slice of that delicious guaranteed revenue.

Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it's even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the "freemium" model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it's a secondary "convenience" fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.

If you're talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it's because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn't be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn't stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.

imo, the subscription style is the evolution of "planned obsolescence".

people are willing to give money if the goods have an expiration. so instead of the goods expiring, the concept of validity of the goods now expire. same money, but saves on making different goods altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

Less people were tech literate back then, and the ones who were would likely pirate things like music, than consider buying things out of convenience.

When everyone and their grandmas got online, convenience was something more people were willing to pay for.

That's just my theory though.

Istg this is a bot

It's a similar reason retail stores try and push their loyalty programs, it's a more guaranteed source of income than a one time payment.

Because now is the age of techno-feudalism.

Bc people get stupider over time, it seems. :-(

If you had to pick, would you rather get a large ammount of money semi regularly, or a smaller ammount of money on a consistant schedule, oh and there is no alternative for your customer than to keep paying for as long as they use your product.