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The Great Escape: The future’s listed – Music in the cloud

By | Published on Thursday 13 May 2010

“In the future we’ll own lists”. That was the message from The Great Escape’s session on the big bad ‘cloud’, and the growth of music services where users access tunes over the net rather than from a locally stored MP3 collection.

Some reckon that, in the same way many music fans have moved from owning physical CDs to possessing a folder of digital music files on their PC, the growth of Spotify and other so called ‘cloud-based services’ will mean that in the near future music fans won’t even own MP3s. Instead, a music fan will have a personal database of meta-data which will link to music files that may be locally stored, or may be accessed from an online ‘data locker’, or maybe streamed via a Spotify or We7. Time investment aside, the playlist will be free to create, but pressing play might instigate ads or require a subscription to be paid.

But where will these playlists be hosted, and what happens if your playlist platform of choice suddenly goes offline, as happened to US-based music network Imeem last year?

“Each user’s playlist will eventually exist outside any one music service”, We7 chief Steve Purdham reckons, “and users will be able to use one playlist to power their listening on whatever device or service is most convenient at any one time. If one streaming service disappears, users will be able to import their lists into another and carry on. As things progress, the process of exporting and importing playlists will become easier, or even automatic. It used to be that moving your email data from a Mac to a PC was a nightmare – my wife did that recently and it was really easy. Your playlist data will soon be able to easily move from one service to another”.

How far in the future are we talking for such portable playlists, and will all services comply? “Not that far into the future”, Steve continues, “and yes, I think everyone will adapt to share data in the same way. We have to. No one service can own their users’ data, success will be based on  us utilising a user’s data in the most compelling way”.

So, will this mean users will be able to move their playlists between arch rivals like We7 and Spotify? “I think so, yes”, Purdham concludes, “the flexibility to be able to access your playlists anytime anywhere will become such the norm, every service provider will have to participate”.



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