Music Ownership Soon to be Obsolete
For a long time I have been reading the various tech blogs (especially Tech Crunch) raving about the need for DRM-free music and also basically saying that music subscription services are the stupidest thing in the world. They contend why would anyone want to rent their music when they can own it?
I contend why would anyone want to spend their money to buy a few songs that they "own" when they could pay a subscription service and have access to any song they want. Maybe it's just the way that I consume music. Since 90% of the time I am listening to music on a computer (and connected to the internet) it has never been an issue for me. So to me in exchange for paying a modest subscription fee, I feel like I own virtually every song ever made. So it's always been a no-brainer to me. I subscribed to Yahoo! Music before it shut down and now subscribe to Rhapsody.
I was refreshed today to see someone else agreeing with this concept. This CrunchGear post was pretty dead on in my opinion.
Last week I bought my T-Mobile G1, so now with the Google Android operating system and the 3G network I am ALWAYS connected. I had my Blackberry before but it was the EDGE network so I was only semi-connected! So with my G1 in hand I was at my in laws the other night. We were talking about how country music star Chuck Wicks went to college with my wife and I. The in laws hadn't heard his hit song before, "Stealing Cinderella", so I brought out the G1 and fired up Imeem Music Player and played it for them... streaming over the internet to my phone!
So the point is not everyone consumes 90% of their music like me: in front of a computer. But now with the broadband smart phones, tons of other connected devices being invented every day, WiFi everywhere, and soon with all the old television frequencies being freed up broadband internet access will be even more ubiquitous. So with all kinds of devices being able to connect to high-speed internet from anywhere... owning music gets kind of irrelevant. In fact having to "lug around" digital copies of the files from device to device is a pretty huge hassle compared to just having it live in the cloud.
The time may be coming when everyone will be subscribing to their music service of choice and just streaming their "rented" music from whereever they happen to be on what ever device they happen to be using. Wow! What a liberating thing the cloud is!
So Rhaposdy... your day just may be coming soon! Now can you please get us a player for Android???
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