Comment by zmitri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmitri | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who has put together a cloud music player/site, I can assure you that uploading is by far the biggest deterrent from people using the service.

In fact, out of my large music library, I only have a couple thousand songs of my own uploaded. Out of a few hundred users, there are only 3 others who have uploaded a similar number of songs. My service allows you to share playlists with your friends and loads of users don't upload anything and are just dependent on playlists form their early adopter friends. If Apple gets the rights to skip out on having users upload it will be a huge win.

It also seems like Google and Amazon are in this space only for the sake of trying to get people on their respective Android platforms (in the case of Amazon up and coming) where as Apple at least has _some_ sense in organizing music nicely and creating a nice playback experience. The Amazon UI kinda makes me shudder as I always end up clicking on things by accident because there are too many links/buttons embedded in each row.

Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music? I'd think that you could just have a button in your UI that says, "Upload all my music in the background". And then just do it constantly in the background.

I'd think that Apple could just have the same button in iTunes.

> Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music?

1. It's a chore to even do it

2. Consumer landlines are generally very asymetric. I have an ADSL line providing 1.1 MB/s (no typo) down, but 75kB/s up. I have 32GB of music on this machine (in lossy encodings). It would take me 3 weeks and 4 days uninterrupted to push that to "the cloud". Not only would make my internet connection completely unusable in the meantime (I don't have a QoS router), 3 weeks before I can truly use the service is hardly seamless.

If uploading is so hard, then why is Dropbox so successful? I'm on the max plan and I don't have any problems syncing. Sure, it takes a looooong time, but I expect it so I'm ok with it. Make the uploading automatic & out of sight and most people will have no trouble at all.

I assume it's successful in part because very few people upload the full 2GB quota in their first ten minutes of using Dropbox. I installed it, poked around with a couple of MP3s and PDFs, and then stopped. I doubt many users of Dropbox upload more than a couple hundred MB at a time.

> If uploading is so hard, then why is Dropbox so successful?

because for most users dropbox does not require uploading tens of gigabytes (blocking) before you can start enjoying it.

Most DSL lines are ADSL and have limited upload bandwidth. Even for me I have 25Mbps down/800kbps up. I run bittorrent and have it QOSed and limited to 400kbps up. Uploading just one album would take all day (but probably shorter if done at night) so someone wanting to upload a sizable music collection will probably take longer than most people have the patience for.

Now, you could prioritize what albums get uploaded but then you're back to curating your music (picking which songs get priority) and most people don't want to do that. If any of these companies are able to do a music service without needing to upload files then they win.

It takes time and lots of bandwidth -- it's a serious commitment compared to using something like Grooveshark, Spotify, or if Apple is allowed to do it: by scanning your iTunes Library xml file and automatically permissioning you to play your songs from anywhere. If you are dealing with huge amounts of files you need to create a client side uploader apps to keep track of failures and loading new songs -- which also means users have to keep that app running. This is why Amazon pushes hard for mp3s you purchase from their site to be pushed to your player and don't count for storage space. I decided on uploading from the browser using drag and drop as it was the most natural way for me to upload music, but might implement a dropbox like queue system.

I do agree that it takes a lot of time and bandwidth, but for the user it should just be one click. The app can just be a service that is installed and runs on system startup in the background, so the user never has to even think about after they clicked that button in the UI the first time.

With that said you've actually done it and I haven't. But it seems like the type of thing that shouldn't be too hard. I suspect Apple will nail it with iTunes support.

> but for the user it should just be one click.

One click and a few weeks worth of waiting while the client uploads your complete music collection.

Perhaps this will be rolled out in Europe and Asia before the US.

Even in Asia, uploading tens of gigabytes of music is not a small endeavour.

What prevents Google/Amazon to handle the upload like Dropbox does ? I mean if someone else already uploaded a file with the same hash it would be available automagically. I realize that this would not work for self-ripped-encoded albums but it would work for legally/illegally obtained songs.

The legal precedents prevent that.

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