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Will You Stream Or Download Your Mobile Music?
mikp writes "In a David-and-Goliath style fight, small music companies are battling it out with established behemoths to see who can own the future of mobile music. Spotify, the Europe-based music streaming company, is about to launch its iPhone app and has plans to develop it for other mobile platforms soon. In a preview, Spotify shows how you can cache songs to your iPhone so that you don't always need a connection but the songs don't remain on your iPhone permanently. Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CWM phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year. The question remains, are people more likely to stream or download music on their mobile phones?"
I'll continue to buy it on CD and rip it to MP3, thanks. :)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
It really depends on price.
Free or cheap, and I'm streaming it. My care for what happens after the point I heard it is in direct proportion to what I paid for it.
Anything more than pennies per song, and I expect to purchase it, sans DRM. Just the way I roll, and the only manner which seems ethical to me.
I'd rather buy music on physical CDs, rip it to my hard drive, and then load and play it on the device(s) of my choosing.
But then I'm old-school that way.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I use Ampache to stream my CD collection. The fact that I own it, and can choose what I want to listen to, beats streaming where the right to listen at any given time can be revoked.
12:50 - press return.
I've also heard that Real has an iPhone App for streaming from Rhapsody pending approval.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
both... download to my home system... and stream it to wherever i may be.
There are times and places for each. Streaming lets you discover new music with little risk. Downloading lets you listen to specific music any time and any place, without regards to network conditions.
Surely, there is room in this world for both models.
-Sean
I will stream. The problem I have with listening to my own collection is twofold: 1. I'm limited to the music I have. While this currently is 20,000 songs, most of them suck. Why not stream the entire library of music ever made? 2. I have to decide what song I want to hear next. Yes, I've heard of the "random" button, but point #1 precludes this as a viable option.
Nokia, on the other hand, has just announced two more music phones that will feature Comes With Music, an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year.
Am I the only person that went to the CWM page and slid the "Please Select Your Location" bar up and down for about 5 minutes? The United States of America does not appear to be on the list. Is this music going to be restricted by what region you live in? Because when I click UK they say they asked the best in the music industry to sign a deal with them and they all said yes ... are they talking UK only? How did they handle royalties and copyright fees? Is that why there's no US?
My work here is dung.
I'll continue to download. Which doesn't mean I won't also stream. I listen to an iPod, and to XM/Sirius. One doesn't preclude the other.
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If it's DRMd with a time bomb, then it's not really downloading, is it? It's just streaming, albeit with a large buffer (say, gigabyte-sized) whose contents are deleted after a year, rather a small buffer (e.g. a few megabytes) whose contents are deleted when it is full.
I would prefer to download music, neither of the two solutions offers downloadable content; merely different implementations of ephemeral/disposable content (that is, streaming).
By the time either of these solutions comes to market, you'll be able to just upload existing MP3s to a phone with open firmware, and use the phone's CPU to decode the MP3s for playback. My answer, therefore, is Mu.
Monty. Not Alex.
an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year
Umm, Hell yes I will. Thats the legit, non-piratey way to get EVERY SONG you ever wanted for a REALLY low price.
HA!
download, greedy streaming bastards!
I, for one, will continue to steal my media. My ISP's idle threats are well worth the calculated risk.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I wish I had the original writeup, but someone once wrote that people are either "radio or record" music listeners. I like to pick a 'station' that plays a type of music I want to hear, than select all my own songs.
This was last week:
According to the USgovt downloading is *stealing*.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/26/1956201/US-Fed-Gov-Says-All-Music-Downloads-Are-Theft?from=rss
So I will stream it thank you.
Although the technically enlightened will say that streaming is equivalent to downloading. With the only difference being the data lifetime in the buffer.
... I still carry around my Mangiadischi Penny portable record player!
If you're downloading a cache of songs then your still downloading songs. They might not stick around long, but then a lot of tracks that end up on my phone don't stay there for that long.
Thinking about it, streaming is a form of downloading, so really, downloading wins as everything except CD Ripping is downloading.
Of course, I still prefer ripping CDs to FLAC format (I rarely download, and when I do it's usually from somewhere I can get FLAC format files), but each to their own.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Shoutcast + WiFi. Or 3G, failing WiFi.
That wasn't so difficult was it?
D'OH! Guess I killed my television a decade too soon.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I'll keep things local, be it downloaded music or ripped physical media. The batter life on my iPhone is already bad enough. I don't need a constant internet connection drain that battery as well.
IF I wanted to listen to music on my phone, which I do not, because I'm not an antisocial fuckwit who wants to be deaf by the time he's 30 and run over by a truck while jogging, then I would put it on an sd card from my harddrive since I hate messing with crappy, small and slow UI on a phone.
I'm an iPhone user. My Music solution was simple
1) Leave all my music on my server(I have a bigger music collection then my phone holds)
2) Create an MP3 stream using an open source streaming server
3) Install a streaming app on my iPhone
4) Control my music selection using the web browser on the phone.
4) Enjoy the tunes!
Of course, my phone is jail broken so I can quite easily bounce between my streaming app and Safari without the music app closing.
If you want to find the answer to that question, just find any study on media consumtion from the 80's.
Streaming replaces "listening to radio" and "watching MTV". Downloading replaces "buying records".
A few years ago AOL came out with Music Now. For $10 @ month I could download my fill of DRM'd WMA files. I didn't really mind the DRM that much because I had access to so much music. AOL sold Music Now to Napster. Napster changed what was available. I used to be able to get a lot of Japanese music. Jpop, Enka, etc. OK I could still download music and use it with my DJ application (Virtual Vinyl) Still not a bad deal for $10 @ month. Napster got sold to Best Buy. No more downloads. Streaming only. This service sucks. Point is either of these companies can change their content delivery on a whim, and the consumer would be powerless to do anything about it. Like many others said, I'll just buy a USED CD and rip to MP3 from now on. Thanks for screwing over a legitimately paying customer Best Buy.
I've handled a few cell phones. Some newer, some older. Sound has generally been pretty shitty. Are phones suddenly sporting real speakers capable of decent music playback? They now have stereo? How about SurroundSound? I'd sure like to see one of those!! Why are people bothering to pay for music to be played on those crumby little speakers? Earbuds aren't any better. Few laptops have sound worthy of playing music - for that you need an add on sound card and external speakers.
This looks like much ado about nothing, IMHO Of course, gullible people tend to make much of nothing.
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Will You Stream Or Download Your Mobile Music
I will, of course, download it, regardless of what the vendor wants to call it. But if it costs less for them to use the magic word "streaming", then by all means, they can do so.
When I go running, I often go through areas with bad coverage, plus I have a "Running/Workout" Playlist with music of the right tempo, aggression, etc. So I'm using music stored on my iPhone in those cases.
At home and in the car, I use a combination. Sometimes I want to listen to specific tracks and so it's my list (or MP3 downloaded on iTunes and ripped to CD) from a stored format. About half the time, I also stream Pandora. I stream Pandora in the car through my iPhone and then through my music distribution system at home.
When I'm gaming, I turn my Samsung BDP-1960 (on sale for $218 at Walmart now) on and stream Pandora on an aggressive alt/techno channel, while pwning noobs in Halo3 on the 360 (playing on the TV, but lately I don't really have the TV on where I can hear it).
Everyone with a Crackberry or iPhone at my work just listens to Pandora streaming over 3g... Although I would love an hour or so cached, because on my commute I pop in and out of 3g zones (since I live in a rural suburb)... Really I just listen to old fashioned FM in the car when I run out of audiobooks.
If they're going to offer the same kind of music that's pounding your ears on all the mainstream radio stations, it's going to be largely useless, no matter the price. If I tune to a mainstream radio using my cell phone and I get the same 10-15 songs over and over again, then why should I buy them online? On a more general idea, this applies to each and every online music store out there: if you don't have a large database of songs that cover underground as well as mainstream tastes, then, well, lots of people would stick to the old way.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
OK, so you have a cell phone. It communicates with a cell tower based infrastructure where there are a (relatively) fixed number of maximum connections that can be maintained at one time. A cell phone communicating (voice or data) occupies one of these connection ports while communicating.
The cell phone tower also has a physical connection to a data network with a maximum bandwidth inherent in such connections.
It is my understanding that for data connections today a cell phone does not have a constant connection to the network but switches on and off as needed. Thus, the cell tower can accomodate a lot more data connections than voice connections. But still there is an obvious upper limit.
So there are two basic limitations on the use of cell phone data connections: a maximum connection limit per cell site and the maximum bandwidth available to the cell site. These two limits are important for the future because they are not trivial to change. By far, the maximum bandwidth available for data connections can be (somewhat) trivially increased up to the limit of the radio system. Beyond that, you need to either add channels, change frequencies or change the entire infrastructure. Not trivial.
I do not know how far we are away from reaching these limits, but we have already seen what happens when the voice channel limit is reached. It isn't pretty and is rather disruptive. This limit has been sidestepped (with microcells) and worked around by changing to new frequencies with more channels. But there are still hard limits. And sidestepping or working around the current limits may not be practical to do, especially if it so people can listen to music streamed to their phone.
Streaming music to a cell phone is great for early adopters, because the bandwidth is sitting their idle. Changing the entire cell phone infrastructure to accomodate streaming music should it be adopted by the masses seems, well, incredibly idiotic. Why would we want to do something like that?
How the different delivery plans fare will depend on what music/etc is available from them and the price. Presumably the vendors will make sure ease of use is comparable.
I want AT&T to feel the strain I feel every time I look at my monthly bill.
Might as well get my monies worth.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
That link to youtube is actually for their latest demo of a Google Android application.
They are both downloads. the only difference that with one, it stays longer on the computer. So the question should be: "How long do you (want to) keep your music?". Which of course is dependent on the music itself.
I listen to Shoutcast radios, for which I happen to have made a StreamRipper extension to decide to only keep what I want to keep, before or after I listened to it. With remote control, and Amarok integration. It's working well for me, but feel free to do with it whatever you like: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/armSR4amarok&listen.stream.tar.bz2 :) :)
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Right now I have songs off ripped CD's, purchased from iTunes, emusic, amazon and more. I play them all on my desktop via Songbird and stream them to my Windows Mobile phone via Didiom. I bought the music...I will do whatever I want with it.
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I'll download it to my computer, then stream it to my iPhone using Simplify.
I already have a streaming mobile device.. its called an FM radio. Oftentimes, however, the station's selections suck and I pop in burned CDs instead. Whats to say any G3/G4 based music streaming service wouldn't suffer the same issue without some upstream control.
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I normally do not know the names of half the songs I like anyways, so Pandora is great for me. Even better - its free. Then I can use my iPhone for what is important - APPS!!!!!
Download music to my PC, then stream to my phone. They've even had an iPhone app for a while, but you'd never catch me with an iPhone.
Orb is Windows only, but I'm sure there are other similar open source programs for Linux/OSX that work pretty much the same as Orb.
Advantage of something like Orb is I can stream pretty much anything, my music collection, live TV, YouTube, Internet radio, all the movies on my PC, etc...
D'OH! Guess I killed my television a decade too soon.
If you can't tell the difference between Alex and Monty, I'd say a decade too late, not too soon...
I went to the spotify home page and there was a link to "find out why spotify is not available in your country" I didn't click it, but I'm pretty sure it would just link to a picture of Bush or would take me straight to the RIAA's homepage.
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I want all my p0rn^w music on 165 mm^2! http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdxc
My spirit takes a journey through my mind...
Vinyl baby!, seriously though, I too want the physical media. It produces higher quality and I am not at someone else's whim. I have vinyl from the 70's, CD's starting in the 80's and quite likely will adopt blu ray for the highest quality. I picked up the Jewel concert on BD and the sound was fantastic. (I spose if you don't like Jewel you probably would not agree here)
I'm quite sure, when people realise that digital content is free as air, and anyone trying to make a business out of charging for making personal copies of or sharing music, video, whatever that doesn't cost anything to reproduce, are either stupid or evil. Artificially limiting the spread of cultural expression is huge obstacle to public creativity, and laws that encourage such absurdities will only be abided in countries with totalitarian governments. This will all be old news in, lets say, five years.
Then, when this is realised, you will not stream or download, you will have a lot of music on your phone, and when you miss something you will stream it from your own home server, or from wherever else. There might even be live feeds you like to pay to listen to live, or listen to it later for free.
iPhone user in southern California and I must say I'm very impressed with Pandora.
I cannot keep an FM signal through the mountain passes on my commute, but Pandora seems to be able to stream flawlessly the entire drivetime on 3G.
Absolutely awesome, and free.
I rarely even listen to the music I have on the phone. But I do buy my CD's and rip to iTunes.
If Spotify is like slacker, it's pretty nice... slacker.com has a nice colleciton of stations, it's stream-only on the PC (can't speak for AT&T, but with a Verizon aircard I've streamed it no problem for hundreds of miles of highways...) On phone it'll cache (I wouldn't need that given my luck with streaming, but OK...), and there's hardware players that also will preload music via wifi and cache it. I haven't used the phone app or hardware devices, but the web interface is quite nice and I can't see how they could screw it up on the phone or "radio".
It is quite true, this doesn't give any sense of ownership to the music, there isn't one.. it's more a way of having a wider choice of radio stations and customize it if you wish.
Stream or download? From a technical standpoint, perhaps they are favoring downloads (into a cache) to deal with less-than-comprehensive coverage, but form a use standpoint this is more equivalent to a stream since it's in some cache rather than an mp3.
So use-wise I'd answer this as "both". Some people DO want to own their music (previously a record, 8-track, tape, cd, now a mp3 ogg or flac..) and streaming does not replace this. I find the level of customization on these streaming services quite acceptable. I have a lot of MP3s (from back in the napster days plus rips of my CDs), I hardly ever listen to any, I stream music much more frequently.
I guess it all depends on the definition, but when you start listening to spotify, it will instantly start downloading the file to a large cache locally. There are programs that can decrypt these files (ogg format). Spotify is mainly just a P2P service that somehow got accepted by the music industry.
For the android you can use http://musicfromnet.omnia.dk to stream music from your own server using webdav. No need to fill your memory card ;)
Not counting the speed texters, that's about 15 pounds per hour maybe.
Tell the kids their texts cost TWICE what their job pays them!
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Why So Sirius?
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where do you think the noise comes from?
I like to have a choice in how I store my music and what quality I store it at if I have it online.
Professional Audio CD's are sampled and encoded at a much higher rate than MP3's - thus if I want to store my music in a lossless or a lossy format, I can.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
...until I got hooked on Pandora. Then they cut off my free service after 30 hours in a month, and I forked over for a year of full service, which is fairly astounding... I'm a cheap bastard. I have a huge collection of mp3s, but even putting the whole thing in shuffle it just gets old and stale. Pandora throws in new stuff every now and again, and does a good job (for me at least) of predicting what I'll like. Have discovered all kinds of new music this way.
No, I don't work for Pandora, or have any stake in their doing well. I'm just a fanboy.
"For the life of me,
I can not
n-n-n-not remem
ber
What made us th
th think that we were wise"
Yeah, downloads please. Streaming over cellular service is not interesting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No.
Next question?
(To clarify - I don't "do" music. It's a waste of time. If I want something to drown out the squawking of the children on the bus, or the drone of wheel-on-tarmac, or whatever other background noise is going on, I put in an audiobook. And there's nearly no repeat market for them - once you've heard it, you've heard it. Next book please.)
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natehoy said, he will continue to buy it on CD and rip it to MP3. OK! It's a smart choice. ImTOO CD Ripper http://www.111download.com/product/imtoo-cd-ripper.html