A recent survey of iTunes customers has revealed that a high percentage of music fans would be interested in paying for a music service based ‘in the cloud’.
Of course, ‘In the cloud’ is the current buzzword for on-demand services based on the Internet which use shared resources and information to deliver content to a variety of devices.
A ‘cloud’ system would enable fans to upload existing collections of albums to a server, from which it could accessed and streamed to other computers, mobile handsets, MP3 devices, games consoles etc..
This would work in a similar way to Google documents and calendar, which can be used essentially anywhere that the user can log-in to their account and easily synched to other devices.
Research conducted in the US this week by NPD Group indicated that, out of 50m users of iTunes, iPod touch and the iPhone, 7-8m would consider paying up to £6.50 a month for such services.
Major technology players such as Apple and Google are expected to unveil ‘cloud’ based services later in the year.
Pop Icon David Bowie wrote an article in the New York Times in 2002: “'The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity”.
Generate Debate: Will this take the world one step closer to Bowie’s prescient comment that music would become like a utility piped out from a central source? Who will be the first company to deliver a user-friendly cloud service with mass appeal? Would you be interested in subscribing to such a service? Is this a response to the overwhelming variety of devices that can now play music?
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