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.