Two interesting data points have popped up that are pointing towards a radical change in music acquisition and listening habits.
Crunch Gear has presented the idea that actual music ownership is headed for obsolescence. They argue that with the advent of ubiquitous, always-on fast internet and robust streaming music services, the need for having local copies of songs will become a thing of the past. Why have to pay for and store gigabytes of audio files when for a low monthly fee, you could (theoretically) have streaming access to all the world’s music at your fingertips?
As far-fetched as it sounds, this could easily be a plausible future scenario. Non-local, cloud based computing is becoming more of an everyday tool for many, and trusting the cloud to handle all your music needs does make sense. This is still probably a few years off though. As seen by ATT&T’s sluggish network congestion at SXSW, the current system is not quite ready to handle everyone streaming music at the same time. Or for that matter, what happens when your stream unexpectedly goes down?
Along these same lines, MusicThinkTank points out that internet searches for “Free Music, Free MP3s and File Sharing” have gone down (as seen in the graph above), and they predict this indicates file sharing is on the way out.
Crunch Gear: “How will The Cloud change the way we think about music ownership?”
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i’ve been using lala.com for months now and I don’t forsee ever downloading music again
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I agree- heard of Spotify, Dan?
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I agree that music filesharing is being replaced by streaming, but the reason the number of searches for “free mp3s” have gone down is because everyone already knows where to get their free mp3s.
That’s like saying webmail is declining in popularity because nobody is searching for “free online email account” anymore.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Where does that leave the up and coming local artists? They need to be able to make it somehow and that is by selling their music and getting support by the community. Lets bring it back to the roots
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:37 pm
yeah, that or the fact that everybody has already downloaded what they needed… and we see a drop in D/L’s because of that..
Also, what about portable players which are not online all times.. um, they need local copies..
March 24th, 2009 at 6:02 am
File sharing is not going away. Yes, people are using streaming services. But until every (portable) device can stream (this will take YEARS if ever) every artist (this will never happen) including new/unsigned artists, file sharing will occur. Also, what I never see mentioned is friends sending songs to each other…people still do this and if I want you to check out a song it doesn’t make sense for me to tell you to stream it when you have a chance (in which case you’d hafta remember the band/title) instead of having a mp3 ready to play.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:02 pm