Last.FM have announced that they will be providing a huge amount of their catalogue available for free, streamed from their site, with artists paid from advertising and possibly some sort of subscription model.
This is part of a worldwide trend anticipated by many of us for a very long time. Several mobile phone networks are in the process of releasing “music plus” packages, where you get pretty much any music you like, for free, at any time. Again, artists are paid from the phone subscription package.
Obviously streamed music can be copied. Over at Rogue Amoeba, who produce Audio Hijack Pro, they’re an interesting post on this, wondering if this is going to be a problem for the free-streamed model Last.FM have developed.
I don’t think it matters. You won’t bother keeping a copy for yourself for much longer in any case. Why have copies of all those CDs, or MP3s, when it’s all available from the Internet, all the time, at zero cost and effort? The only reason to keep a copy yourself was an artifact of the primitive method of packaging and distribution - not because there being millions of individual copies of a piece of music is inherently useful.
So, in ten year’s time, I reckon the kids won’t have a single copy of mainstream music themselves. Their record collection will consist of a set of bookmarks only - and the whole “music business” as it currently stands will just be a brief “blip” in the history of music, from it’s origins in live-only performance to it’s future as a ubiquitous cultural service in the cloud.
I was saying this, about nobody owning music, a few weeks ago at a party and I was shocked by how fuddy duddy the reaction was.
Most people in the conversational huddle seemed to think that owning the album would continue to be important to people, and were lamenting “my idea” for the way that kids wouldn’t be influenced by leafing through their parents record collections. I told them that everyone would just share their interests online.
Those people were luddites and I told them so, but I think people can so easily get stuck with their expectations.