Crunchgear asks some interesting questions about what it means to own a song if it resides in the cloud.
One of the highlights of last week’s SXSW show, aside from seeing the Austin Crew again (hi, guys!), was when I spent some time talking to a few of the guys from Rhapsody, just like I did last year. The conversation touched a number of topics, but the one I found most interesting was the changing notion of music ownership. That is, now that most of us are at least familiar with streaming, on-demand music from pick-your-service (Imeem, Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc.), will people in the future still see music as a “thing” that they’ll own, or more like a service that they’ll tap into whenever the need arises? Will people still cling to a finite number of MP3s on their iPod, or will they prefer to have their music on The Cloud, using a device (say, the iPhone) that can call upon any song at will? A sort of, “Shoot, I wish I had that U2 song on my iPod right now” versus, “Here, let me stream that U2 song for you.” And, if people are becoming more comfortable with this type of music consumption, where does that leave traditional, download-to-own services like iTunes and Amazon MP3? The things we think about!
When I pay for a song, I want to be able play it anywhere, anytime and on any device as many times as I want. It also important to me personally that I can download the digital file to the device of my choice. For me that is what owning a song means.