I keep hearing these rumors that the end is nigh for music stored locally at least from a huge goliath like Apple. Even if it’s not true, it had me thinking. Let’s look at the music landscape. If I search Amazon for Coldplay’s latest album, I’m given the first option for Streaming which appears is free with my Prime membership (I had no idea). Second choice is an MP3 download for $9.99, CD for $10.79 and Vinyl for $30.02. A quick digression, I use Amazon Prime for 2-day shipping because I order things like paper towels on Amazon since I live 45 minutes from the nearest Wal*Mart or grocery store. The fact that I don’t use the other Prime features most likely has to do with the fact I’m an Apple ecosystem user. There is no Prime application for Mac or AppleTV. Also, I don’t want to rent music, especially if I can’t save it locally to my iOS device and tell Siri to play the music. Prime is a 3rd party feature. I need off-line storage, Siri / Search integration and be able to put streamed music side-by-side with music I own locally. Same with other Prime Content. No thanks.
Back to the point of this post, it seems inevitable that the places that sell the most music will eventually stop selling music. Switching to a streaming platform completely makes so much sense.
- The cost to transfer a song millions of time is far cheaper than it was to transfer 1 MP3/AAC as a download 10 years ago.
- Streaming is not owning, it’s renting music which means a recurring revenue and big record labels with thousands of signed artists love recurring revenue instead of a single sale
- The big artists that make 90% of profits love streaming as well. Drake’s new album was streamed 250 million times its first week. That’s equivalent to 1 million albums sold in revenues
- Streaming is possible with more wide-spread 4G/LTE services and at home broadband
- Streaming is usually lower quality than listening to a CD but since most people use crappy earphones on their mobile phone, there’s no way to tell a difference
- Most consumers don’t listen to an album hundreds of times. One NPR music journalist on “All songs considered” remarked that 40 years ago, 300 records a year would come out. Now, a thousand records a week drop and every week has 2-3 big-name artists releasing new music.
- Despite hard drive sizes growing, where we store content (phones, tablets, laptops) have seen a move to Flash NAND / SSD storage where the ceiling is been stuck for a long time. If you buy a normal computer / phone, you’re getting 128GB of SSD or 16GB of storage. While we had a 250GB iPod in 2008, the best iPod touch / iPhone that costs $800 only holds 128GB of data and that includes OS, apps and photos. The available music storage is less than we had 8 years ago with a physical hard drive iPod
That last point is upsetting but consumers en masse didn’t really push the envelope. Hard drive sizes grew quickly in the days where people would store all of their content on the hard drives. Once wireless broadband got good enough, people switched to Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, DropBox in droves and never looked back. My LightRoom, iTunes, Final Cut Pro and backups run completely against this trend. I think I have 16 terabytes of hard drives all full and I’m planning on buying 24 terabytes of storage this year since I’m physically out of storage space on my home server.
So, aren’t I the best candidate for a switch to streaming?
Well, not really. I still download YouTube videos and watch them locally so I don’t get Annotations, ads, overlays and I like full screen QuickTime Player over SWF/HTML5 playback. It’s smoother and doesn’t drop frames and 4K plays way smoother.
I should get back on topic.
The writing is on the wall for death of music downloads from iTunes. Amazon will hold – off for a while but they will too delete the feature. The local record stores have benefited from a resurgence of vinyl that carry a premium price but if you have a local record store, it won’t be here in 10 years. Independent artists will still sell CDs and MP3 downloads through their custom web-stores but Apple, Amazon, Sony, they have no benefit to selling CDs or digital content. Apple would prefer you pay $10 a month and stream all you want than deal with you re-downloading the purchased to 5 different devices and playing it locally. When digital albums cost $10-$17, why would anyone buy when they can just stream?
Well, that’s the million dollar question.
I think there’s enough of a reason to stop selling new albums but if Apple kills locally stored music in favor of streaming only, hmmm. What if they said that everything I bought from them could stream to any device connected to the cloud and if I join Apple Music, I’d have access to everything else?