“Riddle me this: What would you get if you crossed a BlackBerry with an iPod? The answer: The future of the music business,” writes Charles Haddad for BusinessWeek. Haddad describes a system called Everywhere Internet Audio (EIA) that would eliminate music piracy as we know it. Music wouldn’t be stored, in fact there would be no way it could be stored and it would “evaporate” at a set time like “mist in a jar.”
Haddad writes that, “It’s an ill-kept secret that Apple is trying to figure out how to add wireless Internet connectivity to the iPod.”
There some technical hurdles, Haddad explains, such as how to handle revenues and implementing EIA would “require the labels to offer their full music libraries online, and make them available 24-hours a day.”
“Imagine, if you will, an iPod as a wireless digital ladle. It would dip into a nearly bottomless stream of continual music, scooping up any song you wanted, when you wanted, where you wanted. There would be no need for CDs, hard drives, or any other storage device… Every song would contain a digital expiration date, so, over time, they would evaporate,” Haddad writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Maybe we can’t think out of the box here, but we’re very used to the concept of owning something when we buy it. Nobody can “own” music? For “lease” only? Sometimes we like to dip back in time and listen to a track or album we haven’t listened to in years. What happens if it’s expired? We’d have to lease it again. Perhaps we’d decide not to bother. This would fundamentally change the basic music listening experience, which is why we think it might not work. For example, people have adjusted to leasing cars (although you can still buy them), but the basic experience of driving the car is unchanged. Not so with the Everywhere Internet Audio concept. What do you think?