Streaming music: even better than the real thing?
While paid downloads have failed to catch on, 'cloud-based' listening through networking sites is gaining popularity with fans
Is the download dead? Apple clearly doesn't think so; its announcement earlier this month that music on iTunes will drop its jacket of DRM (digital rights management) may feel overdue, but it's an implicit insistence that it thinks people will keep buying songs to "own" - even if all they actually "acquire" are invisible variations in magnetoresistance on a hard drive.
But with computing becoming increasingly cloud-based, it no longer seems necessary to download or store music. As network connectivity becomes pervasive, the possibility of having every piece of commercially available music at our fingertips, instantly playable via our next-generation portable music players, mobile phones and Wi-Fi home entertainment systems comes closer. So will downloading digital music to an iPod soon seem as archaic as taping the Top 40 on to a C90?
"The paid-download model has failed to meet expectations," says Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst and vice-president of Forrester Research. "The music industry needed a format-replacement cycle, in much the same way that CDs replaced cassettes. It needed to do two things: offset declining CD sales, and fight piracy. The download has failed on both counts."
This is not a love song
In the UK - Europe's strongest digital market - downloads account for only 13% of total music sales, with CDs remaining the dominant music format. Mulligan's research shows that only 9% of UK internet users purchase paid downloads, while 42% buy CDs or music DVDs. (Music industry research broadly agrees, finding that in 2008 only 5% of music downloads were paid for.)
The download seems hard to love. Grumbles over sound compression and DRM have hardly helped its cause. To fill a 500GB hard drive costing about £50 with 79p downloads would cost £100,000; few music fans would claim to prefer browsing through an iPod menu to thumbing through a rack of vinyl LPs.
And the success of the iPod has done little so far to boost download sales: 83% of European iPod owners say they do not regularly buy digital music, apparently preferring to fill their devices with ripped CDs - or illegal downloads.
But 24% of UK internet users listen to streaming music - for example, on-demand tracks via MySpace, radio content from the BBC iPlayer, or, increasingly, personalised playlists from services such as Last.fm. "Cloud-based music will most likely replace downloads to some extent," says Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about music technology at Wired's Epicenter blog (blog.wired.com/business). "The younger demographic already thinks of YouTube and MySpace as the places to go to hear music right away, and devices such as the iPhone already provide access to thousands of customisable stations on Pandora, Last.fm, imeem and so on."
Significantly, cloud-based streaming services offer instant access to music without the need for download or purchase.
"We definitely see a move towards access rather than ownership," says Christian Ward of Last.fm, the London-based (and CBS-owned) music-streaming and recommendation service, which has 25 million users. "Since we launched we've been working towards providing access to every piece of music ever made, wherever you are, and our iPhone app - plus recent partnerships with hardware device companies and mobile firms - helps us get closer to achieving that goal. You can have access to millions of tracks on the go, instead of the limited amount of files you have on your iPod, which is ultimately a glorified Walkman in comparison."
Social networking plays a big part in the appeal of streaming services. Last.fm is based around a music-recommendation engine, imeem is a music-centred social-networking site, and Pandora - currently unavailable in the UK due to licensing restrictions - generates playlists based on musical attributes catalogued by musicians. Spotify, another startup which offers web-based music streaming, lets people create collaborative playlists while offering a huge range of music: it will have U2's latest single ahead even of digital "shops".
Says Ward: "There's no point in having every piece of music at your disposal if you can't navigate through that and make the experience meaningful to you."
But on the downside, streaming services have costs. Napster, which will launch a new web version this year offering unlimited streaming playback of its catalogue from any computer, is subscription-based, and costs from £9.95 per month. Spotify - currently in beta - charges £9.99 per month for a premium subscription (though it also has a free ad-supported version). Last.fm, imeem, Pandora and similar services such as Seeqpod and Blip.fm are also ad-supported and free to the end-user.
Mulligan thinks the future lies with ad-supported and subsidised services - where internet and mobile providers bundle music access into packages. "When you take out the pay aspect, usage goes up," he says. The Danish internet service provider TDC's Play service bundles unlimited free streaming and downloads into its subscription, and Nokia's Comes With Music also offers unlimited streaming and downloads for 12 months with the purchase of a specific handset. Sky is known to be planning to bundle music access into its broadband and TV packages.
Quantity over quality
But the crucial point is that when access is free, there is no need to steal. Piracy has undoubtedly damaged the paid download market: music fans who would never dream of stealing a CD seem quite happy to illegally download - perhaps because music downloads are invisible, and so perceived as having little tangible value.
"If music fans fully embrace streaming instead of downloading, then that would be a blow to the pirates," says Ward. "If music fans are getting the music they want, free, from safe, legal environments like ours, then there's reason to imagine they'll be less inclined to download from peer-to-peer in the future. And with our ad-supported model, the artists and copyright holders get paid for those listens."
But what about quality? Bandwidth limitations mean that no current service can offer CD-quality streams, although Ward doesn't necessarily see this as a problem. "We have a generation of music fans now who've grown up with the iTunes standard of 128kbps, which is the quality we stream music at on Last.fm," he says.
"I think there will be a demand for increased audio quality, but I'm not sure that will outweigh the bigger demand for instant access, on-the-go, to a comprehensive music catalogue. It could be some time before the latter can be offered at CD quality, especially wirelessly. It may be that those who continue to download will be the audiophiles, while the general mass of music listeners will stream at whatever bitrate is most convenient to them."
So, technological limitations may prevent a complete shift away from downloads to streams. "Wi-Fi and mobile networks aren't good enough," says Mulligan. "Coverage is affected by buildings, and distance from base stations, so you'll never get a seamless experience. Streaming is good enough in the home, but on the go it will need to co-exist with downloads."
"Downloads are not going to go away, just like vinyl has not gone away," says Van Buskirk. "But within the next 10 years, I suspect a significant percentage of music fans will listen by streaming stations, songs and playlists from the cloud."
Paul Brown
Wednesday 21 January 2009 13.40 GMT
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
While paid downloads have failed to catch on, 'cloud-based' listening through networking sites is gaining popularity with fans
Is the download dead? Apple clearly doesn't think so; its announcement earlier this month that music on iTunes will drop its jacket of DRM (digital rights management) may feel overdue, but it's an implicit insistence that it thinks people will keep buying songs to "own" - even if all they actually "acquire" are invisible variations in magnetoresistance on a hard drive.
But with computing becoming increasingly cloud-based, it no longer seems necessary to download or store music. As network connectivity becomes pervasive, the possibility of having every piece of commercially available music at our fingertips, instantly playable via our next-generation portable music players, mobile phones and Wi-Fi home entertainment systems comes closer. So will downloading digital music to an iPod soon seem as archaic as taping the Top 40 on to a C90?
"The paid-download model has failed to meet expectations," says Mark Mulligan, a music industry analyst and vice-president of Forrester Research. "The music industry needed a format-replacement cycle, in much the same way that CDs replaced cassettes. It needed to do two things: offset declining CD sales, and fight piracy. The download has failed on both counts."
This is not a love song
In the UK - Europe's strongest digital market - downloads account for only 13% of total music sales, with CDs remaining the dominant music format. Mulligan's research shows that only 9% of UK internet users purchase paid downloads, while 42% buy CDs or music DVDs. (Music industry research broadly agrees, finding that in 2008 only 5% of music downloads were paid for.)
The download seems hard to love. Grumbles over sound compression and DRM have hardly helped its cause. To fill a 500GB hard drive costing about £50 with 79p downloads would cost £100,000; few music fans would claim to prefer browsing through an iPod menu to thumbing through a rack of vinyl LPs.
And the success of the iPod has done little so far to boost download sales: 83% of European iPod owners say they do not regularly buy digital music, apparently preferring to fill their devices with ripped CDs - or illegal downloads.
But 24% of UK internet users listen to streaming music - for example, on-demand tracks via MySpace, radio content from the BBC iPlayer, or, increasingly, personalised playlists from services such as Last.fm. "Cloud-based music will most likely replace downloads to some extent," says Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about music technology at Wired's Epicenter blog (blog.wired.com/business). "The younger demographic already thinks of YouTube and MySpace as the places to go to hear music right away, and devices such as the iPhone already provide access to thousands of customisable stations on Pandora, Last.fm, imeem and so on."
Significantly, cloud-based streaming services offer instant access to music without the need for download or purchase.
"We definitely see a move towards access rather than ownership," says Christian Ward of Last.fm, the London-based (and CBS-owned) music-streaming and recommendation service, which has 25 million users. "Since we launched we've been working towards providing access to every piece of music ever made, wherever you are, and our iPhone app - plus recent partnerships with hardware device companies and mobile firms - helps us get closer to achieving that goal. You can have access to millions of tracks on the go, instead of the limited amount of files you have on your iPod, which is ultimately a glorified Walkman in comparison."
Social networking plays a big part in the appeal of streaming services. Last.fm is based around a music-recommendation engine, imeem is a music-centred social-networking site, and Pandora - currently unavailable in the UK due to licensing restrictions - generates playlists based on musical attributes catalogued by musicians. Spotify, another startup which offers web-based music streaming, lets people create collaborative playlists while offering a huge range of music: it will have U2's latest single ahead even of digital "shops".
Says Ward: "There's no point in having every piece of music at your disposal if you can't navigate through that and make the experience meaningful to you."
But on the downside, streaming services have costs. Napster, which will launch a new web version this year offering unlimited streaming playback of its catalogue from any computer, is subscription-based, and costs from £9.95 per month. Spotify - currently in beta - charges £9.99 per month for a premium subscription (though it also has a free ad-supported version). Last.fm, imeem, Pandora and similar services such as Seeqpod and Blip.fm are also ad-supported and free to the end-user.
Mulligan thinks the future lies with ad-supported and subsidised services - where internet and mobile providers bundle music access into packages. "When you take out the pay aspect, usage goes up," he says. The Danish internet service provider TDC's Play service bundles unlimited free streaming and downloads into its subscription, and Nokia's Comes With Music also offers unlimited streaming and downloads for 12 months with the purchase of a specific handset. Sky is known to be planning to bundle music access into its broadband and TV packages.
Quantity over quality
But the crucial point is that when access is free, there is no need to steal. Piracy has undoubtedly damaged the paid download market: music fans who would never dream of stealing a CD seem quite happy to illegally download - perhaps because music downloads are invisible, and so perceived as having little tangible value.
"If music fans fully embrace streaming instead of downloading, then that would be a blow to the pirates," says Ward. "If music fans are getting the music they want, free, from safe, legal environments like ours, then there's reason to imagine they'll be less inclined to download from peer-to-peer in the future. And with our ad-supported model, the artists and copyright holders get paid for those listens."
But what about quality? Bandwidth limitations mean that no current service can offer CD-quality streams, although Ward doesn't necessarily see this as a problem. "We have a generation of music fans now who've grown up with the iTunes standard of 128kbps, which is the quality we stream music at on Last.fm," he says.
"I think there will be a demand for increased audio quality, but I'm not sure that will outweigh the bigger demand for instant access, on-the-go, to a comprehensive music catalogue. It could be some time before the latter can be offered at CD quality, especially wirelessly. It may be that those who continue to download will be the audiophiles, while the general mass of music listeners will stream at whatever bitrate is most convenient to them."
So, technological limitations may prevent a complete shift away from downloads to streams. "Wi-Fi and mobile networks aren't good enough," says Mulligan. "Coverage is affected by buildings, and distance from base stations, so you'll never get a seamless experience. Streaming is good enough in the home, but on the go it will need to co-exist with downloads."
"Downloads are not going to go away, just like vinyl has not gone away," says Van Buskirk. "But within the next 10 years, I suspect a significant percentage of music fans will listen by streaming stations, songs and playlists from the cloud."
Paul Brown
Wednesday 21 January 2009 13.40 GMT
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
