The Spotify iPhone app has been approved. With this app, I will now be able to carry 5 million songs in my pocket, and every week thousands more songs will be added to my collection automatically. This is the proverbial celestial jukebox – the great jukebox in the cloud that lets me listen to any song I want to hear. This is going to change how we listen to music. When we can listen to any song, anywhere, any time and on any device our current ways of interacting with music will be woefully inadequate.
Has it really? I keep hearing that the Spotify app has been approved, but I still can’t use Spotify, as previously reported, the Lala.com app for the iPhone has been in limbo for more than six months now. But if and when it does arrive, it’s not really going to change “how we listen to music.” We’ll still use our ears for that, and some sort of delivery device like speakers or earbuds. But it will change how we collect and music. Mostly because… we won’t actually have to collect and store it ourselves any more, nor are we confined to the limitations of shelf (or hard-drive) space and budget.
The question then becomes, if we in fact have access-on-demand to everything, what will we listen to? And how will the people who make that music sustain their efforts?
The linked article continues:
The new challenge that these next generation music services face is
helping their listeners find new and interesting music. Tools for
music discovery will be key to keeping listener’s coming back.
Which begins to ask the pertinent question: with changes in the media, patterns of behavior change. What new behavioral patterns will emerge in the era of infinite music — and what business opportunities do those new behavior patterns offer.
And how much do we have to think about such things before we can get a clue what the answer is…??