Posts tagged music

I just upgraded to Spotify Premium for $165 per year. For the cost of a pair of jeans I’m getting access to - from anywhere - roughly 80% off all the music in the world. That’s also equivalent to 11-15 CDs per year that needs to be found, bought, carried home, stored and played. Ownership for many products is starting to seem like a very bad idea. Why do I need to own the physical package or the digital file of someone’s intellectual property? I feel the same about cars, pads, movies, books, sports equipment et cetera. Don’t get me wrong; I love the cool album art from the 60s and 70s when it was an artistic expression and not only a sales conversion tool.  This is only the beginning of the democratization of everything. For a few bucks a month I’ll have access to amazing user experiences w/o the hassles of ownership.

I just upgraded to Spotify Premium for $165 per year. For the cost of a pair of jeans I’m getting access to - from anywhere - roughly 80% off all the music in the world. That’s also equivalent to 11-15 CDs per year that needs to be found, bought, carried home, stored and played.

Ownership for many products is starting to seem like a very bad idea. Why do I need to own the physical package or the digital file of someone’s intellectual property? I feel the same about cars, pads, movies, books, sports equipment et cetera.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the cool album art from the 60s and 70s when it was an artistic expression and not only a sales conversion tool. 

This is only the beginning of the democratization of everything. For a few bucks a month I’ll have access to amazing user experiences w/o the hassles of ownership.

“What if I all my media could be digital?”

My thought in the end of 1999 as I had entered my second year working for Yahoo!. I created this long wish-list of things that I wanted to do with all my media, and low and behold, 10 years later it has all come true:

  • One central repository for all my music and movies (via iTunes Library)
  • Accessible via desktop, mobile and the Internet (WiFi, iPhone and WAN)
  • Streaming music and movies on-demand  (Spotify and Hulu)
  • Downloadable rentals movies (iTunes)

There are still a number of flaws such as lack of real real-time streaming, using proxy server to use Spotify and only being able to have one iTunes app open at a time (if not using Home Sharing).

Since this wishing thing seem to be working here are a few more for the upcoming years:

  • Having all the music I *own* in the cloud - for free
  • Having access to streaming music and movies from around the world (getting tired of the blockbusters)

Apple will most likely introduce music streaming thanks to their acquisition of lulu. Legally getting access to *foreign* news, shows and movies is much harder as the world is already divided into regions, strongly guarded by old media.

I’m getting ready to give away my DVD and CD collection!