are betting that a musical era is ending — that chapter where people
stored their music in digital files on a computer hard drive, an era
that began in 2001 with Apple’s iTunes.
Instead, they see a time where digital music streams
to phones, televisions and cars from the “celestial jukebox” of the
Internet, allowing listeners to play virtually any song, any time,
anywhere, through a variety of Internet-linked devices.
“We’re moving to music on demand in your car,” said
“Do you want to have move your little USB stick out there to the car,
and then back to the computer, and back and forth to the clock radio
and so forth to have access to your music? It cannot be the future.”
Rdio is one of several companies that say streaming
digital music will soon replace those MP3 files on a your laptop or
phone — and perhaps even that rack of aging CDs in your living room.
Rdio, along with
Mog, a similar subscription cloud music service that allows listeners
to choose from millions of songs stored on the Internet, was among a
host of tech and music companies at this year’s South By Southwest
festival in
The rise of smartphones that allow people to connect
to the Internet from almost anywhere, the rapidly shrinking cost of
data storage on the Internet, and the willingness of the major record
labels to offer unlimited access to their catalogues for a
monthly fee are prompting predictions that on-demand cloud music could
soon rival CDs and a la carte downloads for digital music ownership.
Some proponents predict that switch within three years, despite needing
to convince consumers to rent access to their music, rather than owning
it.
and Apple are also working on streaming music services, while Spotify,
a European cloud music service trying to gain access to the U.S.
market, announced this month that it has reached a million paid
subscribers. And
Slacker Radio, an Internet radio service like Pandora that streams
“stations” of similar-genre songs, plans to launch an on-demand service
in April.
believed to be working on a cloud service, which will stream specific
songs from the Internet that users can show they have already purchased
through a service like iTunes, according to industry sources who have
been briefed on the company’s plans. Apple, meanwhile, bought
music-streaming service Lala in 2009 and shut it down last year,
triggering speculation that Apple would incorporate streaming music
features to iTunes before the end of 2010.
Cloud music proponents like
“It’s a behavior thing, and it takes a long time to
get there,” said Savoca , whose company has invested in the technology
to easily transfer its record catalogue to cloud services. For
companies like Mog and Rdio, “it’s early days, but they’ve got great
products,” he said, and “I don’t think retailers will have the stomach
to carry CDs much longer.”
Mog and Rdio offer subscribers unlimited access for a set monthly fee —
for both companies. For that amount, subscribers can select any song
from a catalog of 8 to 10 million tunes, and listen through any device
connected to the Internet, including smartphones and Internet-linked
TVs and Blu-ray players. For times they lack an Internet connection,
subscribers can store songs to a phone or laptop, music they can use as
long as they subscribe.
“You can play, ‘I Will Always Love You’ by
“The era of music on the hard drive is going to be seen as this weird period, as something that was an anomaly,” Mog CEO
integrated into the car’s dashboard — the first on-demand Internet
music service integrated into an automobile.
Obstacles remain, however, to transform a model from
where people own their music, whether on a CD or an MP3 file, to a
model where people essentially rent access on the Internet. Older cloud
services like Rhapsody, which has over 750,000 subscribers, have yet to
find mass market acceptance.
Smaller independent record labels may lack the
technical ability to transfer their catalogs to the cloud, meaning that
it may be harder for cloud services to satisfy obscure or eclectic
musical tastes. And as one skeptic at a South By Southwest panel on
cloud music services asked: How many couples will be willing to pay
Sigurdsson acknowledged Rdio’s own research shows people remain skeptical.
“There is still a whole ton of work to convince
people that they want to select what they want to listen to — that they
don’t want to just turn on the radio and listen to the country
channel,” he said.
And “it is emotional, of course it is” to give up
ownership of CDs and MP3s, he said, but “you give up ownership of
something for the benefit of access to much more.”
Hyman, the former CEO of Gracenote, a company that
allows services like iTunes to incorporate data such as album art when
people rip tracks from CDs to their computers, says the music industry
will move away from a need for devices like the iPod and iPhone with
huge amounts of storage capacity.
Mog, Rdio and Rhapsody are competing to integrate
their services into other car makes. BMW’s Mini Cooper features Mog on
a display inside the car’s speedometer, controlled by a joy stick to
the right of the driver.
The competition to place music services in cars is
crucial, Hyman said, because people listen to so much of their music
while they drive. The Mini Cooper system, which requires a smartphone
running a Mog app, goes on sale this spring.
“Our goal for Mog is to be ubiquitous,” Hyman said, “like air.”
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