Don't Cross the Streams

(Video unrelated, but really good.) There's a cold, precise, strategic logic behind the shift towards streaming services and devices. The reduced onboard memory of streaming devices enables portable form factors and makes them cheaper to produce, and having instant access to a plethora of content without sifting through shady sources or waiting for downloads ain't bad either. While the music industry's been busy dropping ball for the past ten years, the founders of Spotify made an important realization: if you want to compete with piracy, you need to be more convenient than piracy. And for better or worse, they're doing just that.

But there's a slight contradiction at play here: if Moore's law keeps up and memory keeps getting smaller and cheaper, what's to keep people from wanting - and consequently buying - devices with more memory? iPods aren't exactly prohibitively expensive (they couldn't move millions if they were [although they are a low-margin-high-volume product]). And services like Google Music allow you to upload your own library and stream from any device. So there might be a chance yet for us music aficionados to avoid being herded into the pay-per-play system. But we need something new.

If memory costs and personal streaming are non-issues, the real weak point emerges: convenience. Spotify lets you listen to whatever the hell you want (if you have an internet connection), and requires zero ripping, management, etc. I personally am not interested in streaming because I want to have high-quality (320 kbps) audio available with or without internet, and possibly because I'm old-fashioned. I enjoy managing my music library (I chronoalphabetize my vinyl records). But most people don't. So why not create pirate streaming services? Data connections are fast enough; anonymity seems like the biggest problem. Streaming services are great, but to me they smell like a closing door on free information. Once someone has exclusive control of data they can charge (or advertise over) whatever they want. Let's hope someone in the underground cooks up something better.