The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users.
They haven't developed one acceptable to them. One acceptable to users already exists, it's called P2P.
Attempting to charge people for a copy of easily-copied digital information is unlikely to work as a business model because charging people involves friction and therefore any service that charges people money is likely to be less convenient than one that doesn't.
What might work is pre-payment, where fans pay musicians (or other artists) to create a work. The difference is that they're not attempting to enforce payment at the time of delivery, which is futile given the existance of the massive copying machine known as the Internet. Pre-payment works as a form of copy prevention because you can't copy something before it exists.
I also heard of some companies trying to apply this to specific cases.
-fixed
So yeah, I agree, if that were available I'd be the first to sign up and buy my array of hard drives.
I think napster is the most viable existing service that provides a service close to what you are talking about. It has DRM to prevent these types of abuses. It's otherwise affordable. It's not like most people around here don't know how to take DRMed music and rip it...
Why do i want to buy hard drives and manage a huge collection of mp3s? I use to but got tired of doing so...now with my iPhone I just stream the music I want to hear.
SOme of these iphone apps and services cache the music so when i have no internet I listen to the cache.
Could you be more specific about the apps you use and the caching features?
I'm interested in moving my music into the cloud as well.
Thanks.
Edit: were you referring to a theoretical service or a real one?
That's it, most likely. Sooner or later this will be the most viable strategy for making money on music. Even if the internet were turned off tomorrow, the continuing presence of rippable media (analog media, if nothing else), the easy availability of ripping tools, the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a really good recording and a merely average one, and the prevalence of terabyte hard drives with ever-falling prices means that sooner or later we will all have the recording industry's entire back catalog stored in our homes. It's just a question of how much time it will take, and whether the primary medium of transmission will be P2P downloading or face-to-face swapping of the contents of physical storage media.
Ironically, perhaps the best way to prevent the music lover of the year 2020 from energetically acquiring his or her own private Universal Music Library is to give out reasonably priced universal licenses. Once I know that I don't have to own my own copy of (e.g.) the complete works of Yanni -- that, if I ever feel some strange desire to listen to them, or to force someone else to listen to them, I can always P2P them from NapTorrent 4.0 in three minutes without any additional cost, difficulty, or risk -- I won't actually have to own them. The cloud can take on that task.
With an all-you-can-eat model of music, especially for p2p distributed, how does the record label know whose music is worth more based on downloads. There will be little incentive to sign on new or indie groups and pay them while the consumers will likely download their music anyway, assuming it is covered by the all-you-can-eat license. New artist would be shut out of the system unless the had some sort of connection(corruption, manufactured pop group) to the record label.
And the record labels wouldn't even have to pay current artists in proportion their success if that success can't be measured. Even if they measure success by torrent activity, there would be still little incentive to sign new groups. As always the little guy gets screwed.
Maybe this could be arranged to work and even be better than the current system. But, I don't want to pay a monthly fee that goes to 90% of music that I don't like just to get the 10% I do like.
Tell that to the countless Indie bands that produce music 10X BETTER than mainstream music. They don't have near the same amount of money as top 40's pop artists, but they don't care. They make the music cause it's what they love to do, I'll be damned if their stuff isn't sometimes better.
Obviously sol, it goes along with the entire virtue of being an "INDIE BAND", but the beauty in this is that they all have their own distribution methods, their own labels, and their own little microcosm within the industry. And it's thriving, very well.
* They may make good music but they won't get paid as much as they should for it.*
How much "should" they get paid? They distribute their own music however they deem fit, so if there was a memo that got passed around that says "a musician should be making billions of dollars because we're a society that simply thrives on entertainment", then my entire post here is moot.
The Indie subculture is doing VERY well on it's own, and they are by far more sympathetic to file sharing because they want the exposure.
Less financial incentives to produce good recorded music to be played back by private individuals.
Live music will continue as before. Commissioned music (i.e. movie, TV, and commercial soundtracks) will continue much as before. Every musician whose record sales don't support them financially -- which is a very large percentage of musicians; go read some essays by recording artists on the subject of record contracts -- will continue as before.
Or, who knows, maybe it will all break. It's not as if the future is easily avoided, and it's not as if the current system is all that great. My favorite musicians make almost no money from recordings.
The DRM really isn't a big deal, because I can listen from anywhere with internet without even installing software. It's "Music As A Service" and it seems very fair and reasonable to me.
To be honest, my only complaint with Napster is that Apple refuses to let their hardware be interoperable.