Spotify: How We Will Consume Music in the Future

January 30, 2009

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I’ll mess this up, but here are the various ways we’ve been able to enjoy music throughout history:

  1. Live

  2. Vinyl

  3. Radio

  4. 8-Track

  5. Cassette

  6. CD

  7. MP3

  8. …?

Cloud.

Spotify is the future of music. Not the company, necessarily, but the model it uses. See if this appeals to you:

  • All Music Ever Made (and you can upload to it)

  • 100% Free (they pay the royalties)

This is how things will work in the future, and the future is already here (well, not in the U.S. yet). I actually already have a Spotify invite, but I can’t activate it because I have a U.S. IP address.

Needless to say, I’ll be activating it within a couple of minutes. 🙂

Heads-up. The Cloud Model for music will soon (1-5 years) dominate supplant the need for (and appeal of) local collections. While it will still be attractive to “own” a music collection, and some will still do so, it’ll be much more appealing to not have to worry about whether or not you have a given song, or whether you have it in the version or quality that you want.

With a cloud-based service you’ll simply ask and have it appear. Local collections (on your mobile device, for example) will exist only to get you through times when you can’t be online–which will increasingly be fewer and farther between as time goes on. ::

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