Joe Public

Is Music Moving to the Cloud?

Heyweed and Peter02I make excellent points. All music subscription services so far recognize only the individual person (or sometimes the individual device), but not the couple or the family, as the subscribing unit, making the service pretty expensive for some. This is unlike cable TV, a successful subscription model, which recognizes the household as the unit customer.

Nicholas, the technical problems that you would like to assume have been solved are a significant impediment to more widespread adoption of of cloud music. I understand you want to examine other aspects of the problem, but if the technical issues were magically gone, a lot more people, young and old alike, would be content to get their music from the cloud. The technical issues are are more numerous and are a lot less solved in the real world than you think they are, I believe.

But putting technical issues aside, there are still matters of trust and dependability. It would be stupid to assume that the company you buy your music service from will always be there. We have already seen several music services disappear, Yahoo Music Unlimited for one. If you put a lot of work into your music profile and organization, I guarantee you will be very unhappy when you have to start over from scratch when your old provider goes belly up.

Another factor, which you give some mention to, is the content owner. Going back again to Yahoo Music Unlimited as an example which which I am familiar, users found that record labels would UN-license their content from time to time. Your favorite artist might all of a sudden become unavailable simply because of a contract issue with the label, or simply on the whim of the label.

I think cloud music will continue to grow, but there remain many populations for whom the current business models have little appeal. I also think subscription (rental) music and music ownership will co-exist for quite some time, unless one or the other is made very unattractive by regulation, taxation, etc.

Netbook Sales: Cannibalizing Notebooks or Incremental?

Anectodal: Our story is that I bought a netbook for my wife for Christmas. It was an incremental purchase, and I was attracted by the $300 price point. I would NOT have bought a notebook PC. She wanted something small and convenient for web surfing - something smaller than a notebook. I think the notebook is partly a new product category and partly cannibalizes notebooks. Good for Microsoft perhaps, but maybe a wash for chip makers and PC makers.

Apple Drops DRM from iTunes Music; What We Really Need Are DRM Free Videos

Dan, I disagree in part. Maybe for Apple's bottom line, DRM-free in the iTunes store is not a big deal. And maybe it is not a big deal for users who view their purchased music as somewhat expendable. But I know there is a significant number of people who will not buy DRMed music. It's too much hassle to insure that your licenses are properly backed up and that you can transfer your music to other devices you may own in the future. What is the life span of the typical iPod, two or three years? If I buy a music track, I don't want to lose it simply because my old player gets replaced.

I happily buy DRM-free downloads from the Amazon MP3 store and from lala.com. I have never bought a DRMed MP3, and I don't expect to in the future.

The Commoditization of Music

I too spent all of my accumulated points (far fewer than your total) in the last couple of days of the promotion. The promotion worked, as we did buy Pepsi over Coke just to get another point per 2-liter bottle. I had never used the Amazon MP3 store before, and I was generally pleased with the experience. I wish you could buy more than one song at a time. All the downloads I bought were encoded at 256 kbps. I had to convert them to 160 kbps so they would play on my MP3 player.

I can't believe you never bought Dark Side of the Moon on CD. You are one of the few, I think.

I refuse to buy DRMed songs, so I was happy to give Amazon a try. I expect to go back and buy some more songs on my own dime.

As far as buying music from other sources, don't forget eBay and half.ebay.com for used CDs. Also, there is a site called lala.com where you can buy "web access" to songs for 10 cents each, and often whole albums are available for less than $1. "Web access" means that you can log on to the web site and listen to the entire song or album (streamed) as often as you want whenever you want - so long as lala.com stays in business, I guess. To entice you to buy a song, you can listen to the entire song for free once. After that, it's the usual 30 second sample. You can also buy MP3 downloads from them, and there is a CD trading feature as well. I have had a (free) user account on lala for a couple of years for CD trading, but have not yet used the web access feature.