Maybe for some couch potatoes and geeks who spend all their time hunched over their PCs this is okay, but Apple at least understands their demographic: people who download music and take it with them. In the car, on the airplane, running in the park, mowing the lawn. It is a total fallacy that people are "connected" all the time. The closest thing that comes to this is the smartphone that averages from a few bytes per second throughput for text messages to a few KB per second for voice calls and emails. Data rates and volumes above these numbers start to get expensive very fast. Compare this to the $2-$3 per GB cost of local flash storage and $.07 per GB for disk storage.
"Music execs" are of course excited about non-local music content, because it means higher revenues and less chance of copying, which is better for THEM. Don't try to dress it up as some nebulous benefit for the consumer.
iTunes is pretty much the place to buy music these days — cd’s seem so old school now that downloadable digital music has become so mainstream. That’s not where it ends though, as “downloadable” is already starting to seem old too.
Google is betting on the future of cloud based storage for your music library — a service Google appears to be calling your “digital locker”. As broadband internet access becomes more and more ubiquitous, local storage becomes less and less important. What do you think about a phone or music device with no storage? One day that won’t seem strange.
“Finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform,” said a label executive who asked not to be identified. “What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.” — Reuters
With big players in the industry getting excited about real competition for iTunes, we’re sure to see things heat up soon.
), I think cleaning lavatories for a year would be just recompense. If barely.
