Online music streaming services are altering the way people find, buy, and share songs--when will iTunes join the fun?
Dozens of startups now offer Internet-based music streaming technology, making millions of songs instantly accessible from almost any device. But the biggest digital music platform of all--Apple's iTunes--hasn't yet moved over to the Web.
A big question hanging over an event that Apple is holding this Wednesday is whether such new features will be announced for iTunes.
No published reports suggest that Apple has worked out the licensing deals needed to offer its vast collection of music via Internet streaming rather than solely through downloads. But Aram Sinnreich, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and the author of Mashed Up, a new book about digital music, believes Apple doesn't need to take this step this week. "Is Apple operating iTunes at the cutting edge of music technology? Absolutely not," he says. "Are they in danger of losing their share of the market? Absolutely not."
Internet music streaming is becoming increasingly popular. Pandora, a startup that offers streaming music and various ways to discover new tracks, has more than 48 million users and has consistently seen its iPhone app atop download charts. Spotify, a similar service that has yet to launch in the U.S., has around seven million users worldwide.
Sinnreich expects Apple to launch more social features, such as integration with Twitter and Facebook, which would give iTunes functions already offered by sites such as Pandora. These features would make it easier for users to share information about what they're listening to and what tracks they recommend. As the market leader, Sinnreich says, Apple doesn't need to innovate as much as it needs to simply sell more songs than competitors. As Apple is one of the only profitable companies in the digital music industry, he notes, its conservative approach has paid off.
Some analysts have expected Apple to launch a streaming music service since its acquisition late last year of Lala, which lets users upload music legally and stream Web songs from any computer. Incorporating Lala's technology into iTunes would solve a couple of big problems, Sinnreich says. He notes that iTunes has lagged in allowing users easy access to music from a variety of devices (besides the hardware that Apple sells itself). Lala's upload features could make personal music collections much more portable.
Streaming music will eventually have to be a part of any successful music platform, says Phil Leigh, founder of the market research firm Inside Digital Media. "Web-based music, not downloads, will be the future of recorded music," Leigh says.
Cloud Drive could signal a change in the way music is delivered.
A service for developers combines music recommendation and streaming.
The technology for downloading movie-length videos is ready, but their multi-gigabyte files would overwhelm current broadband connections.
Hackers surely have a way to take the streamed songs and convert them to mp3s (or whatever). Such conversion utilities turn streamers into (totally legal) free download sites. The hackers at the end are committing an undetectable theft of IP. Join a streaming service for one month, and convert all your favorite albums into mp3s, then cancel. Voila! You've got $2500 worth of music for $25, and nobody will ever know except you and God. If I were a musician or publisher, that's why I'd be leery of streaming.
OTOH, it might actually _help_ the industry's bottom line if streaming became the _dominant_ way to listen to music, because then it would be easy to keep track of which songs were being streamed (just like radio). Of course, that idea presupposes that most streamers would report their streaming, which may be laughably naive.
I'm horrified that as the rest of the world moves towards the cloud, technology giant Apple insists we all install a large piece of software (iTunes) locally on our computers' hard disk drives.
Now they've even added social media to the mix, adding 'Ping' to iTunes. Don't they know modern social networks are based on websites?
What of music just becomes something else, the majority of ppl don't pay for their music, its become such an individualized even a really localized thing, thanks to musicians being comfortable with posting their stuff up for free especially underground and indi labels, the fans support their musicians by attending the concerts. Isn't it pervading thought that record labels cash in on cd sales anyways and artist earn more by touring?
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
aunderdown
77 Comments
Streaming vs Downloads
I've been using iTunes for a few years now and find it great. With a streaming type service, there is a requirement for having a connection, wireless or otherwise, available when one is listening. To me, this could sometimes be a disadvantage. Also, streaming makes the customer give up a little more privacy. This is because, with streaming, a record can be created of a person's listening habits, both timewise and location-wise. On the face of it, this seems innocuous, but it seems every day there is some new peroduct or service that is designed to include collecting information about customers as they use it. I expect that people are already working on analytics that aim to bring diverse, seeming unrelated data about customers into an integrated picture. As a customer, this doesn't really appeal to me.
Does streaming have any advantages relative to downloads (from a customer perspective)?
Also, from a network perspective, streaming implies using bandwidth every time a customer listens to the same tune. Isn't this a wasteful approach to using a limited resource?
Reply