Recent Posts on the Future of Music
Recently there has been a bit of chatter around music accessibility and the future of music consumption. Both CNET and CrunchGear have written about the future of music consumption – namely about on-demand streaming, and the impact it will have on the music industry, consumer, and artist.
There are different takes on how this should/could work and how it actually can benefit the consumer and the industry at the same time. A novel idea, eh? CNET’S Matt Rosoff had the chance to chat with Rhapsody’s Tim Quirk (VP of programming) at SXSW last week and they discussed how bands who have staying power will be the real winners of streaming on-demand. The repeated track listening from a band with a fan base that stays true year-after-year will become the livelihood of services like Rhapsody as opposed to a here-today-gone-tomorrow pop star. Tim notes that because there is no limit on the amount of the music you can consume, you’re far more likely to expand out beyond what’s popular, wtih a subscription or streaming service, which is great for bands that may not have PR muscle behind them.
Over at CrunchGear, Nicholas Deleon is more focused on the “cloud” concept vs. physical ownership- a concept that, until very recently, people have been hesitant to swallow. He points out that our ever-growing connectivity should make it easier for us to access music in an on-demand fashion, as opposed to having to go physically purchase it somewhere. But the real rift comes between what most people understand (purchasing) and what many are discovering (streaming via the “cloud”). Kids these days are born with Internet savvy, and are inherently more comfortable with the “cloud” concept. Does this mean that the “cloud” inherently the future?
Both posts are worth a read and they both bring up interesting points. There is no denying that the music industry is changing. The question is, in which direction is it headed?
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Those ‘kids’ are too used to ‘free’ music they download from p2p site.
See, we already have a excellent, free ‘cloud’ platform called p2p. Unlike other so called ‘future cloud’ service you are talking about…
1.) Does not really suffer from ‘downtime’ Since there are millions of users and as long as some are alive, the link is alive.
2.) Not only songs can be downloaded any time without restriction (besides from legal issues)
3.) No DRM. even if whole p2p program is shutdown by police downloaded songs remain playable.
4.) It is already implemented in mobile devices such as PMP (yes, recent PMPs from some Korean companies can run p2p via wireless) Tell me what ‘cloud’ services can operate on PMP or other music devices as standalone?
5.) Finally, it’s free. No 20 bucks for each month.
I am not interested in cloud, p2p or other stuffs (I am kinda old about this issue) but if I ever have to choose ‘cloud’ service for streaming, I’d rather choose p2p.
Only thing that legit cloud services have as an advantage is better streaming protocol. That’s it.
These are what you guys are missing:
1.) There are TONs of GOOD, GREAT and EXCELLENT albums and songs available, but many of them are either out of print and production. And you guys do not provide any solution to this. Obviously rerunning old albums are not so efficient enough, but they are so huge that they have potential to be money.
2.) You will be surprised that many people hate lossy compressed mp3 files. Those people who are willing to spend a lot of money on good music collection will not care anything on online services until someone provides LOSSLESS quality, which is equivalent to CD, DVD-A or SACD.
I really want to see a store what have all major labels and good classical music labels, with all of albums they had published available as FLAC format. Price does not matter to people who are looking for real good collection. Linn Record charge 35 bucks per a album and no one complain about it since it is 24bit DVD-A quality FLAC files!
As I said earlier, it is good to just combine cloud service and ownership service. You can stream any music you want, and if you want to ‘own’ some, pay some extra then download.