In the 2000s, the ability to download individual songs and shuffle them in iPod remade listening habits and musical tastes.
This decade, all signs are that the music industry
will try to move away from selling music that consumers own and store
on their own devices, including iPods, iPads and other MP3 players.
Instead, this may be the decade of the cloud.
Music files would be stored on remote servers that
listeners could access whenever they wished, either by paying a fee or
by listening to periodic commercials.
“Cloud”-based subscription services — such as
Rhapsody, MOG and Napster, which was relaunched as a pay site in 2003 —
maintain libraries of millions of songs that users can play as long as
they have an Internet connection.
None of those services have caught fire yet with the public, and Spotify, the Swedish service popular in
Since launching an iPhone app in 2008, Pandora has grown rapidly. It now claims more than 50 million listeners worldwide.
Don’t think Apple founder
Apple bought the popular site Lala.com in December,
then shut it down in the spring, fueling speculation that an Apple
cloud service is on the way.
The prospect of storing your music collection on servers owned by Apple — or
which is also rumored to be getting into the cloud-music biz — would
mean not having to deal with running out of storage space on your
80-gigabyte hard drive when you’ve got 30,000 songs on it. But it also
might mean that you’ll wind up paying, in some way, every time you
listen to one of those songs.
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