Earlier today, thanks to a Tweet from @danpatterson, I read Rolling Stone's 2003 interview with Steve Jobs. That interview, published two months after Apple launched iTunes, includes this comment from Jobs on the music industry:
We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don't want to rent your music -- and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.
After reading that I couldn't help but wonder if the huge success of the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and similar devices, not to mention the not-so-coincidentally concurrent interest in cloud computing, will change how people think about buying, organizing, and managing music.
I find myself using the iPhone/Touch apps for Pandora and Last.fm a great deal. Toss in Simplify Media's streaming music app, which allows me to stream music from my iTunes library and the shared libraries of friends, and it starts to look like we're taking a significant step toward an entirely different model for music consumption. Yes, I "own" the music in that library, but if I can access, as I can through Pandora, a nearly limitless selection of music any time I want, do I really need to own the songs -- in the traditional sense?
That traditional music consumption model is based entirely the idea of access to the music you want, whenever you want it. The reason you buy a song from iTunes or Amazon, or buy a CD from Walmart (you Luddite!) is to insure access to the music. So what happens to that model if you have assured 24/7 access to the music you want to hear -- without having to physically store the music on your device(s)?
True, calling up a specific song on Pandora or Last.fm isn't as easy as doing so on my Touch or my Nano, assuming the song I want has been loaded onto the device. But there are limitations to the number of songs I can carry on either device.
An even bigger issue, literally and figuratively, is that my music library is already huge. It takes up most of my hard drive space, plus space on an external drive. So the more music I own, the more hardware I need to by.
In contrast, an iPhone or a Touch or a similar device can provide access to customized play lists on Pandora or Last.fm (assuming the necessary apps and network connection). So even if my control over those playlists is limited, I have access to far more music than I could store on the device -- or even on my desktop machine's hard drive.
As wifi becomes more ubiquitous (it'll be interesting to see what happens with WiMax and some of the community efforts to blanket entire neighborhoods with free wifi) the need to store music on my device becomes far less important. The storage space I save on my Touch or iPhone can be used for more and increasingly sophisticated applications.
When I eventually replace my home computer, the need for a massive hard drive or even an entertainment server will come into question in the face of alternatives. If I have to store my music and other files in fee-based cloud services (rumors today of the pending debut of Google's G-Drive), a competitively priced subscription music service that can provide 24/7 access to any song I want, from any device I own, starts to look anything but dead.
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