The Mandelbear's Musings

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.

This blog post by Jon Udell pointed me at Amazon's S3 -- Simple Storage Service. It's web-accessible, high-bandwidth, high-capacity storage, all you can eat for $0.15/GB/month plus $0.20/GB of data transfer.

What it means for this old hacker is that I could back up my 2.5GB home directory for less than forty cents a months. Probably less, because I'd compress and encrypt it (in that order!) before uploading. I could back up all my track masters for a buck and a half.

There are, obviously, better solutions for distributing music or hosting a website, but I suspect you can't beat Amazon for reliable, comparatively cheap backup of modest quantities of data. Get much above 100GB and you may be better off putting a hard drive in your briefcase and sticking it in your desk drawer at work. (Or, for short term but massively redundant and highly accessible storage you can always encrypt it and post it to Usenet.)