Entertainment For Lively Minds
In the future no one will own music
Posted by BigJimBob on 17 February 2009 - 12:49pm.
With the birth of Spotify it seems the music industry as we know it may be reaching its endgame. Now that streaming through torrent variants is as slick is this - and it can only get better - everything will be available on demand. Never mind ringing the death toll for vinyl and CDs, when this kind of technology is embedded in phones it doesn't look like conventional iphones (and ipods come to that) will have any role: why keep gigabits of files locally when you can anything you want, when you want, for free?
Or am I missing something here?
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I wouldn't like to be reliant on computers
...or phones. I spend a lot of holidays up in the Highlands for instance. It's not unusual for me to find no access to any phone network or wireless network for the computer. Local storage of my music, no matter what the media, is vital at times like that. I got stuck in the Highlands once without any music at all. Not nice!!!
When spotify has all the tracks I have failed to find.....
maybe. But still unlikely, as many of us prefer the hard copy.
Unless, of course, the future is a small and readily accessible selection of pre-chosen, pre-digested music. "All the music you could ever possibly want (as long as it's in the Tesco top 20 albums)"
This is just the start
This is all just a question of improving present technology, no step change is needed. Pretty soon the telephone company will have rolled out a signal everywhere in the UK; it is over 90% already. As to "all the tracks I have failed to find.." its only been up and running for a few weeks. It (or the next generation widget) will do that; "build it and they will come". Give it a few years, the next generation of music listeners wont have a fetish about solid products, then it will be embedded. Never mind Cloud Computing, Cloud Music is on its way.
I am not saying this is wonderful, I am not even sure what I think about it - I'm just hypothesizing that this is its inevitable final destination.
Cloudbursting time
I have a bit of a problem with the concept of cloud computing. I like to make sure that all the applications and data I want are always available and backed up. Surely clouds come and go dpending upon the vagaries of the local weather conditions! I think it's a very poor choice of phrase that is actually intended to describe something that is always there and can always be relied upon to do the same thing wherever you are in the world.
Perception
I think the current perception a lot of people have is that all your music will be stored on one pc, one hard drive etc, and people's experiences of that is that hard drives die, expire etc.
However, Spotify is giving us a view of how that will change - music will be distributed - not just across corporation's servers, but across the machines of millions of users. Therefore if your hard drive dies, there will be a million other users out there who have the same files you had!
I think a good comparison is newspapers - I don't buy a daily paper, I get RSS feeds, visit websites etc. However, occasionally I will buy a sunday paper for the 'experience' of sitting down with it on a sunny afternoon with a coffee. I think music will become similar - the bulk of it will be 'distributed'. However, occasionally I might want to put on a CD and browse through the booklet.
Whether there will still be an industry to make and market the CD remains to be seen!
Same as Jim (although I would say it is wonderful), Spotify is not the end product, but it's a glimpse of things to come. Extend the concept to video, TV, movies, games....
Rich
It's got to be easy.
Your point that the next generation of listeners will not want a hard copy of their music is the most valid. There's only a few of us left who like to have a CD or album.
And listeners always gravitate towards the music source that is the most convenient. LP's, tapes, CD's all prove this. Future Spotify models are the next logical step for listeners because of the convenience.
Presents
What about giving people presents of things like cd's or vinyl? The Christmas and Valentines markets are heavily driven by CD sales as gifts. What do you propose in its place? A stocking full of mobile phones? A dozen red URL's?
DRM could live on
Despite being the last one to support DRM I think it may actually have a role to play in this. There will be occasions when listening to a stream is impractical, in a plane, in a car in the middle of the desert, in a submarine! Most of us will know when we're likely to be in these situations beforehand so if our portable devices included a bit of memory we could fill it up with tunes that would self destruct within a week (or whatever).
Apart from that, the big problem with online databases that are outside our control is that they are rarely organised how we want them to be. Spotify is brilliant when I want to listen to a particular track or album or if I want to set off mine or someone elses playlist but it wouldn't be able to handle smart playlists in the way that iTunes currently does without some very very flexible tagging. If I want to set up a smart playlist on iTunes to give me a random hour of R&B at home I'll spend the time listening to Dr Feelgood et al. I shudder to think what I would be listening to if I did the same with Spotify or if I didn't look carefully at the automatically created tags I get when I rip a CD or download from Emusic.
Does anyone know if the Spotify business model
plans to keep the free access with ads option? I have a nagging feeling that it could all end up as a subscription service - brilliant but costing cash. I hope not...
but you know...
...as surely as music will go to this kind of centralised storage 'cloud' model, so too, inevitably, will you have to pay for access - just as you had to pay for access to a CD when you went in and bought it from TW Records (Bexleyheath Broadway, RIP).
Thinking about it, the other record shop on Bexleyheath Broadway was called Cloud 9. How prescient.
not...
if you have Audio Hijack ;-)
true
but that's always been true
all you needed in the olden days was a shooter and a couple of dodgy mates, and the contents of HMV was yours for the taking.
But I want to own it
I have bought plenty of vinyl and CDs over 30 or so years and I like their physical presence in a room. My home PC is broken and my so called mobile phone is about 6 years old so just manages to make calls and send texts, which is all I want it to do. Otherwise I fit the Word demographic fairly well on income, age, radio listening and having an ipod (not recently synced due to aforesaid PC failure). I don't want the entire recorded output of this and the last century; free or not, it just isn't attractive. But this is marketing technology not loving music for its own sake, so I guess I'm missing the point!
Was wondering..
..the same thing myself. The current free model must be a loss leader? Maybe the ads will increase over time to such a level where they become obtrusive thus forcing folks to subscribe (so they hope)?
Why do we have to have physical things, man?
Why do we read a novel and then put it on a shelf, on display? Why don't we just give them away, or throw them out?
In the new world, it looks like we will be able to access any music from anywhere and play it on demand, possibly via the toaster. Do we need a "thing" like a CD to put on a shelf to prove ownership of a piece of music?
I chucked out all vinyl 10 years ago because I emigrated. I now have 100s of CDs and I have no emotional attachment to them -they are a means to an end to access the music. As downloading and Spotify/Last FM has begun to build a head of steam, they are gathering dust (apart from the ones in the car). In short, I think I can get used to not having physical CDs.
Ah but...
...will Spotify and it's like be able to guarantee that tracks they have now will still be there in the future?
Imagine the scenario: You're watching tv or reading something and it jogs your memory about a song you love but havent heard it for a long while. You go to the search function on your streaming site in excited anticipation and....it's not there. And, more to the point, it's not anywhere, because the artist has decided they want to be the only place you can get it from. But not yet.
That's when not owning the music yourself will bite.
I getcha
So in that case you may pay them to let you download the stuff you want. They may even have CD or vinyl versions. If you didn't pay anyone to have it - then tough cyber-bananas.
Sort of...
...I'm not saying it will have everything ever recorded. But the idea of it being distributed means that maybe one day, you'll be able to add your own music library (digitised into whatever format) and share it with the world. Now imagine 200 million other people doing the same. Surely that will a) open up the possibility of getting to all those rarities you haven't got and b) safeguard the stuff you have got cos someone else out there is also likely to have it.
Rich
Pirate!!
"one day, you'll be able to add your own music library (digitised into whatever format) and share it with the world. Now imagine 200 million other people doing the same"
That's pretty much what the peer to peer file sharing networks have been doing and what the companies want to stop them doing.