Blog: Is Music Moving to the Cloud?

[townsend]

(2010-05-20 16:05)giladt Wrote:  Please leave any comments or feedback in this thread.
Thanks,
Gilad

I'm not sure streaming someone else's cloud music as per the services you mentioned is primarily relevant to typical Linn customers (though R3@320kbps might be nice compared with FM).

However, storing my music in the cloud, so I don't have to mess around with backups, NAS, vpn to home server so I can get to it at work, or manual copy/synch etc - yes, that's interesting. I already use Dropbox, it works very well.

If the DS had a baby Linux computer inside with an SSD so it could install dropbox and synch a copy to itself and included a decent control point, great. Or if someone built such thing as an add-on with network port to drive the DS (actually lets just call it an old laptop :-) ) that would be pretty good. (or just an external firewire DAC as I do from my MBP).

Or here's a random idea - Dropbox on iPad works well, its a great controller, you could just add AirPlay protocol support ...

But yes, of course the answer is yes, with cached (and down-sampled / compressed where appropriate) local copies where necessary and DRM permitting.

[portfair]

My current music collection is 471GB. Assuming I've got the correct Dropbox I'd need 5 X their Pro 100 accounts at $19.99 a month. Sorry but $1200 a year to back up my music collection is way too much. Plus I'm only about half way through ripping. And then there is the 98+ days it would take to upload 471GB! Upload speeds, ISP bandwidth restrictions and price just don't make this feasible for me at the moment.

I suspect something more like the Spotify model is the way forward, with individual's paying a monthly a subscription fee to access on-line catalogues and/or a pay as you go option. Perhaps you'd start with a basic fee for access to MP3's and then pay more for additional benefit e.g. the latest releases, 16/44, hi-res etc. You could allow a limited amount of local caching, say the last 50 albums/500 tracks played to save on bandwidth and allow for times when internet access was down. This eliminate the back-up issue for the end-user altogether. It still requires an infrastructure to support it but it looks like the obvious way forward to me.

[townsend]

(2010-11-30 20:08)portfair Wrote:  My current music collection is 471GB. Assuming I've got the correct Dropbox I'd need 5 X their Pro 100 accounts at $19.99 a month. Sorry but $1200 a year to back up my music collection is way too much. Plus I'm only about half way through ripping. And then there is the 98+ days it would take to upload 471GB! Upload speeds, ISP bandwidth restrictions and price just don't make this feasible for me at the moment.

I suspect something more like the Spotify model is the way forward, with individual's paying a monthly a subscription fee to access on-line catalogues and/or a pay as you go option. Perhaps you'd start with a basic fee for access to MP3's and then pay more for additional benefit e.g. the latest releases, 16/44, hi-res etc. You could allow a limited amount of local caching, say the last 50 albums/500 tracks played to save on bandwidth and allow for times when internet access was down. This eliminate the back-up issue for the end-user altogether. It still requires an infrastructure to support it but it looks like the obvious way forward to me.

OK, now I'm feeling thoroughly inadequate in the music collection department :-(

The question was about the future, not about the now - who would have believed you'd get 2GB online storage for free and that it would actually be useful. I remember the awe of buying my first 1GB drive at circuit city, I think it only cost me about $300 ...

But I generally agree with you, one of the most irritating parts of the whole process is the ripping, where we go to lengths to ensure our digital copy is exactly the same as everyone else's digital copy, metadata correct as per & etc. ... so much easier to just download or have access to an original online copy, ideally at better than CD quality with all correct data.