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WILL MOBILE STREAMING AUDIO KILL THE IPOD?
Posted by Sean McManus
July 28, 2009 at 4:00pm
3 comments
The service offers streaming audio of music that the user picks from a huge catalogue of (mostly) major label releases. Spotify isn't so much about discovery or social networking, like other streaming audio services. It's more like a library of music that users can access at any time, not to download and own, but to listen to.
The idea of streaming music, rather than buying it, downloading, and storing it, is becoming more and more popular, as broadband becomes faster and more ubiquitous. But the real jump in streaming audio comes when it becomes more accessible on personal devices like cell phones. And that's where Spotify is right now.
The Swedish music company plans to launch an iPhone app very soon. The big question is whether Apple will turn down the app's application, because it poses too much competition to the iTunes store.
COMMENTS
The other big question is what will happen to the dying art of the mix "tape"?
Many of these streaming services have the ability to make, save and share playlists, which is your mixtape. But it's interesting that the free version of Spotify doesn't do this, you have to pay for account to build mixtapes, I mean playlists.
I haven't tried Spotify (since I'm in Canada), so I can't say for sure that it will be the go-to service for music. But in my mind, there is NO question about it: streaming is the future.
Purchasing music in any format has always been about the ability to access the songs that you want to hear, when you want to hear them. Now that we have the bandwidth capabilities to have a central library that can serve this need, owning music in physical or digital format makes no sense at all.
I don't think it will kill the iPod, but the iTunes store sure is in trouble. It's strange to say it, but streaming audio will turn downloadable MP3s into an outdated technology within the next few years.
However, Apple has people hooked on their iPods and iPhones, so if they're smart, they'll support this app and promote iPods as the perfect platform to run it.
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