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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. :)
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
I, for one, will continue to steal my media. My ISP's idle threats are well worth the calculated risk.
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Agreed. I don't really mind streaming, since it can expose me to music I might not otherwise hear (pretty much the sole benefit, as far as I'm concerned), but I can't see the benefit in paying all that much for it. And frankly, I'd rather do my streaming on my home machine, where the data prices come cheap. If I hear something I like, I can always buy/download and copy it over to the mobile.
I realize, however, that my personal preference here is unlikely to count for much, since more money can be sucked from me under paid streaming.
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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.
In my car and in my house, my computer or phone get plugged into real speakers. While the little speakers on the phone might be lacking in fidelity, the codec is just fine and decent-quality mp3's or m4a's sound great played over a system.
When I can wear a quality set of headphones, I use them. They sound great.
And yes, every now and then I want a little music while I'm gardening or working in the garage, and the iphone's speakers are good enough that I can set the phone down and hear the music just fine. It's like the little world-band radio that I used to use but now I get to choose my own music.
And I do stream music, and it sounds surprisingly good.
But then, I've always been the kind of person who listens to the *music* and not the *speakers*.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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?
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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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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Spotify is working on North American licensing rights. It's the same up here in Canada. Basically, our licensing is sufficiently different from European models and such that its just extra work that takes more time. Their a Europe based service, makes sense Europe gets all their shit first.
Of course, you can spoof it's location detection right now by using a UK (or other suitable) based proxy.
And don't bitch about it. Fucking Hulu still hasn't reached Canada. And I can't watch all of Colbert Report and Daily Show on their websites either.