The future of music and the solution to piracy: my prediction
Here it is – this is a freebie for all the record companies, this is the way to make piracy go away, and in turn, be the future of music distribution for the entire modern world and completely change the business of music. I’m calling this in 2007, we’ll see if it comes true.
As pervasive fast wireless Internet becomes a standard throughout the nation, the concept of an iPod will be replaced with a device that will stream and cache digital music that is supplied online via music download services. Any time you want, you will be able to pull down any album and listen to it for a flat monthly fee, just like you can with Napster/Zune/et al. Furthermore, you can do the same thing (albeit slower) with television shows and movies.
This solves the MP3 piracy problem not through lockdown DRM, but by making the concept of pirating MP3s inferior – why bother downloading files to your computer if you can just pull them off the net when you want them?
Because then you don’t have to pay a monthly fee
marmot
2 Aug 07 at 9:14 am
good point, marmot.
resurrectionjoe
2 Aug 07 at 2:29 pm
For people who can’t afford the better solution (or who are just cheap), you’re right – they’ll stick with downloading. But the problem is, currently using DRMed music is a crappier experience than using downloaded MP3s – I can do whatever I want with the latter, and the former is usually broken or limited.
But if you make paying the fee have more features than downloading, a lot of people won’t care, if you can call up any album ever published on-the-fly, while you’re sitting on the bus. That doesn’t even compare to the current system of “find it on Bittorrent, wait for it to download, connect player to PC, hit sync. then go”
Paul Betts
2 Aug 07 at 3:14 pm
You’re right of course. The process of downloading music through a p2p service is less than elegant. Having a subscription service with access to any and all the music you want where ever you are, like you suggest, is a far better and more useful experience.
But I was thinking more of download services from which you’re actually purchasing and downloading music. Some of these are still subscription based (like emusic), but the “subscription” is basically just a way to enforce a minimum number of song purchases.
I’m willing to pay for my music. I just don’t want to commit x dollars a year to it. I also want to own my copy, not “rent” it.
marmot
7 Aug 07 at 9:55 am
I recently saw some new service that offers a demand driven pricing method. Brand news songs and the unpopular come out dirt cheap, and popularity and demand raises the price.
-
Centralized content that gets pulled as needed, either at a membership cost, market value of item, or per bandwidth used that has that zing of instantanious access would naturally show its strength over the download, transfer, and carry method.
The next thing could be in the delivery network. Imagine so much of a certain same content being pulled on this network. Say it be a hot youtube video of the I35W bridge collapsing, of miners in Utah, or one of my Mariah Carey favorites. 100,000 mobiles in the same metropolitan area each make 100,000 downloads from the youtube video server. Each filling up the capacity of the network by having the same chunks of data whir past us 100,000 times.
How about a mobile diffuser service that can combine concurrent streams of the same data into a psuedo multicast that makes the overall speed transfer more effective by taking repeated bandwidth out of the network. Perhaps even having a reward system where a mobile that has the video cached in its memory can short range broadcast it to a neighboring device for some type of credit with the broadcasting servers.
Something akin to your sharing ratio in p2p, that goes into taking that “its better to give than to receive” mentallity into the picture.
Peter Dietz
16 Aug 07 at 11:15 am
@Peter: Yep, that’s basically how Skype and Joost work – they use P2P concepts to deliver phone calls and TV, respectively.
Paul Betts
19 Aug 07 at 8:26 pm