A portable, ever-growing music collection

2009-08-26 10:35:41 -08:00

Here’s an idea I just had. No idea how you could monetize it, except perhaps by a subscription fee, but let’s not worry about that just yet.

It’s a combination of a file-storage service and music-streaming service. You would upload your own music so that you could listen to it from anywhere: Mac, Windows, maybe Linux OSs, maybe the iPhone. You can’t make your uploads public; you have to log in with client software or in a web browser. On a desktop machine, it could make like iTunes and play the local copies of music instead of streaming, especially if the network is down.

The service would uniquify songs*, so when you upload your copies of the songs, it will certainly associate the song with your account, but when you stream it, it may serve you someone else’s copy instead of the one you uploaded—higher bitrate wins, and more/better tags break ties. Not only would this help keep the storage costs down, but everybody who uses the service would basically get a free bitrate upgrade on a song any time someone uploaded a higher-bitrate version of it. (It would probably be a good idea for the service to keep one of every bitrate so that users can set a maximum.)

But here’s the real twist. Suppose that there were an alternate entrance through which musicians could upload their own music for everybody to have. If an artist or label wants to give away a song for free, they can flip a switch and everybody has the song. Of course, any listener can remove the song from their account if they don’t want it. Perhaps the artist (or their label) could see how many people have done that.

So imagine this. Starting from your desktop Mac, you upload all of your music to the service. Then, when you go on a trip, you bring your laptop and/or iPhone and can use one or both to listen to the music you uploaded. And, over time, your music collection grows with no effort from you as musicians post free songs for everybody.

What do you think?

*No, I have no idea how to do that. Title, artist, and album are not sufficient.

8 Responses to “A portable, ever-growing music collection”

  1. Jacob Says:

    lala already does most of this, except they don’t have an iPhone app (yet?). The flash music player is cross-platform.
    You can upload all of your personal music and they’ll store it and stream it back to you anywhere for free. You can also “buy” a streaming version of most songs for $.10 or a DRM-free MP3 for $.89.

  2. ssp Says:

    Hahaha, good luck with that. Just finding a reasonable way to match songs via their metadata seems to have provide a huge playground for FAIL so far.

    The bitter irony, of course, remains that with iTunes library sharing and ever fatter DSL pipes we essentially had a much better solution for the same problem (well actually more interesting problem because of playlists etc) ages ago. But unfortunately Apple decided that it does more harm than good.

  3. Chris Adams Says:

    Except for the artist uploads, this is what MP3.com was sued into oblivion for offering in 1999. It’s a great idea but avoiding the lawyer death-strike would be harder than the technical challenges.

  4. Tony Says:

    Lala is actually having very good success with just that. Other startups, such as TuneBag are also doing it.

  5. Evan Schoenberg Says:

    The music’s fingerprint could be used for near-uniqueness… see http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload or the shareware Song Genie (which I believe uses another engine in the background, though I can’t find the name offhand).

  6. Scott Says:

    Yeah, @Chris is right, although it did also allow artists to distribute their music too — in fact that’s all it did initially.

    Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.com

  7. Jonatan Says:

    You should check out http://spotify.com. It’s live in parts of Europe and coming soon(tm) to a US of A near you. iPhone app just got approved. The only thing missing is uploading your own songs, but there is a service for converting your iTunes library to a spotify playlist.

    I’m not affiliated with spotify, I just love the product.

  8. Peter Hosey Says:

    Jonatan: Yeah, I definitely plan to check out Spotify when that “coming soon” part is over. ☺

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