Infinite Storage for Music

[mdlbear]

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Infinite Storage for Music

Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?

Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight.

Discuss.

I just realized I need a Klein bottle icon.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

They’re neglecting the tendency of file formats to bloat with available storage space. People will go from MP3s to lossless encoding, stereo to 5.1, etc. and wind up using it all up.

You can buy glass Klein bottles if you like.

[mdlbear]

Only a factor of 8 or so between MP3 and FLAC -- three years at the present rate of growth.

George Carlin got it right

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

"Every record ever sold! Yes, you can buy every record ever sold!"

"I'm cutting me own throat..."

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Infinite amounts of music ain't the problem.

Finding what you want, is...

I'm still looking for a good MP3 frontend for a media center type system that will actually use all of the painstakingly entered ID3v2 data on my ~15K tracks - not just the non-length-limited versions of the ID3v1 fields, but the extended stuff too - and let me do quick searches against it. If I had enough time, I'd just write the goddamn thing myself, so that it would do what I want it to.

Information isn't power. There's a metric fuckton of information out there, more than we can possibly use. Indexing information in such a way that you can find exactly what you need... ah, now that's the magic. It's (relatively) easy with text - but much harder (though not impossible) for music. And you can pretty much forget anything significantly more complex; Google Images is interesting, but occasionally manages to be useful almost in spite of itself.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Oh - and by that time the problem won't be buying every record ever sold. It'll be finding copies of all of those out-of-print records.

[mdlbear]

The original Napster was good for that -- practically every out-of-print filk tape was on it.

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

You mention "the traditional music business". What do you think of when you say that? The zillion-dollar mega-corporations and their "stars", or bards roaming the countryside singing for supper and a night's lodging, or something else?

Perhaps I am wrong, in which case someone more knowledgable than I will correct me, but aren't the mega-corporations only a century or two old, at least as far as their influence on the music business is concerned? They came to power with the rise of analog recording and broadcasting technology, and may well fade as analog broadcasting gives way to digital sharing.

Yes, there were lavish theatrical productions before there was recording or broadcasting, but how often did the typical commoner attend one? Even if the answer was "fairly often", such things probably weren't as much a part of everyday life as boom boxes and car stereos and iPods are today. Music was more of a grassroots thing.

So in a way we may be returning to something like the traditional wandering minstrels, even if the highways and byways they traverse and the taverns they play in are virtual rather than physical.

[mdlbear]

Agreed. Actually the "traditional" is in the quote -- I would have used something like "the current state of the music industry". Traditional music doesn't need a business model.

It will take a while before the big corporations lose their grip on music, software, literature, and health care, but I think it'll happen eventually.