Streaming versus owning
There continues to be much discussion over whether people want own their music or rent it. Whether music should “stay in the cloud” or get downloaded onto a device for local playback. The people on the rent side also are typically also on the cloud side and their rationale is that when bandwidth prices come down and super high speed connectivity is ubiquitous then people won’t need storage based devices to house their tunes. And that people will be willing to rent/subscribe to services that allow access to all music - a kind of all you can eat thing.
In my view, technically it’s a nice idea, but not feasible; at least not for the next 5+ years. Bandwidth is too expensive, slow, and the penetration is not there. But there is actually a more fundamental problem - people want to own their music.
There tends to be a much stronger emotional tie to music that any other digital art form and for that reason alone, rental is not enough. People want it to be theirs - and when something is owned, they want to use it the way they want. Rental or subscriptions are the opposite of that. Granted this is really a perception issue: people don’t really own their music, and the files are not really a physical representation of a non-physical thing, but none-the-less, people believe they own their music. To that end, I don’t think that rental/subscription services are the end all of music delivery.
And further, I think that until bandwidth is fast enough to drive the perception of locally experienced files, then music will need both a storage device that is local to give that sense of ownership and experience.
You need really look no further than the market today to know that what I stipulate is true. The dominant music distribution services - iTunes, eMusic, Amazon are download services where you buy your music and are unencumbered by subscription. The dominant form of experiencing digital music is from the local device - MP3 player or local computer. Even things like Verizon VCast are a la carte purchase and download to device services. The bandwidth is not there and the desire for subscription is not there. And even the new iPhone or iPod touch are download and local environments.
And generally, right now bandwidth and storage is just too expensive and the margins on music are just too thin to really make money. That’s why you see these orthogonal marketing relationships like Wendy’s and Rhapsody start to crop up. Odd at best.
Hence the reason we’re building rVibe as an a la carte download service with a local management function and peer-to-pere delivery. That’s why it’s not just another streaming website for playlists and social networking. People use their music locally, people buy music and download it and use it and we want to keep operation costs low.
We made rVibe social music download software, we didn’t make a streaming, subscription website like so many others.
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