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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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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.
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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Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.