Digital Music - Where Next?
March 17th, 2009
I’m a child of the 80s, my music came on 60 or 90 minute cassette tapes and sounded worse the more I played it.
Then came the mighty CD (although my mum still calls these tapes), 74 minutes of digital clarity that skipped when you tried to take it anywhere and scratched when you didn’t put them back in their boxes.
Just prior to the portable digital music player iPod generation, I had a miniDisc player which was a kind of half way house between tapes and CDs and (supposidly) better than both. You had the robustness of tapes with the digital music clarity of CDs. The only problem was that these were about 10 years too late. If they’d have been invented before, they’d have been a smash - the trouble was they were kind of laughable in a world where you could buy a creative Zen jukebox that would store a WHOLE Gigabyte of music on it’s internal hard disc.
And now iPod and iTunes rule the roost. But hot on their heels comes a new kid on the block: Spotify has quickly become my music player of choice when I’m working. But I can’t take it with me. So, where next for Digital Music?
Digital Music On The Go
Surly the next thing that Spoitfy must be working on is portability, and it seams fairly obvious that someone, somewhere must be beavering away on this right now. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Apple - Why not have a service, available through iTunes, that does exactly what Spotify does. Namely offer unlimited streaming music for a fixed fee per month.
BUT what if, as part of your monthly fee, you could license those tracks (obviously with some form of DRM) for your iPod? Suddenly things start to make a lot more sense, The DRM free version on the traditional store would still be available if you wanted to own the music, but you could simply “rent” the music for extended periods of time to listen to on the go. I, for one, would also be more willing to pay a monthly fee for a service that let me take music with me.
Maybe you’d have to re-sync your iPod every week (or so) to renew the rental on your hired music, just to ensure you keep paying the monthly fee and don’t just pay one month and get a load of music for one small price.
If Apple don’t do this, then I can imagine that Spotify may through some kind of iTunes plugin (although I don’t know about the technical ins-and-outs of getting this to work).
It just seems obvious to me that this must surly be the next step in the evolution of digital music. And maybe, with everyone paying a set fee, we can save the music industry.
