Once upon a time, people who talked about a world in which people didn’t have to own things were called utopians and hippies.
Now such folks tend to be capitalist adherents of the sharing economy popularised by Uber and Airbnb or the subscription economy being pioneered by
Netflix and Spotify.
While the sharers have garnered much of the publicity of late, the subscribers claim their own revolution is gathering pace.
I recently interviewed Tien Tzuo, chief executive of online commerce, billing and finance group Zuora, whose cloud technologies help companies build
subscription business models.
He believes that the subscription economy represents a major shift in our culture and consumption habits.
According to Zuora’s research, 80% of the UK population now subscribes to something.
‘We’re moving from a product-based economy to a services economy,’he says, ‘and that has profound, far-reaching effects for consumers and companies.’
Five years ago when Zuora first carried out a study of this trend with The Economist, it found that the UK was further developed than the US in its
identification of a shift towards alternative consumption models.

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