What’s to come: the future of social media consumption
With broadband penetration (and capacity) increasing, and music devices increasingly connected to WiFi (iPod Touch, iPhone) or to 3G (Nokia’s big music push; laptops), the general consensus is that the future lies in media streaming, not the traditional stored music collections (be it shelves of LPs, stacks of CDs and DVDs, or hard drives full of mp3s and DiVX).
A few years from now, you and all your friends will be consuming music online, on demand, from a myriad of different sources. If you use Mozilla Songbird, you can already pull in all the music posted on music blogs and Hype Machine into an iTunes-like virtual music library.
Even more than infinite diversity of on demand music, the killer app for free (probably ad-supported) streaming media is that anyone can access it from anywhere in the world - they just need a link to it (unlike the mp3’s on your iPod). That’s the simple little thing that suggests we’re in for a REVOLUTION in the way we consume and discover music. The logic is simple:
Someone will setup a service which, when you stream music or a video anywhere on the web, will alert all your friends (that have signed up to this); the ones that are interested can follow a link and watch it themselves.
This takes viral media sharing to an entirely new level - it’s not just links via email, posted on your blog, etc - it’s immediate, life-streaming stuff. I envisage a Twitter-like stream of updates from my friends about what songs they’re listening to, what videos they’re watching, and if the streaming service also plugs in its comments into this mediastream, Twitter-like (public) conversations also.
Just like Twitter, it will be very simple to directly message someone (”Hey, @flipbrad, check out this video I’m watching now!) and to follow someone’s media consumption (if, for example, they have very good taste in music, or comedy clips, etc).
So who could do this? As i just suggested to @stein on Twitter, imeem could become the de-facto music streaming service on the web; login to it when you listen to a song on a blog via an imeem widget, and imeem can aggregate everything you and your friends are currently listening to. It’s not hard to imagine Last.fm making a bigger feature out of ‘What Your Friends Are Listening To Now’ and find a way to aggregate streaming as well as desktop-based listening. Likewise, iTunes could make a social iTunes client and link your friends’ recently listened-to tracks to their iTunes music store.
Who knows? Maybe if a web-wide standard for sharing this info could be agreed on, a galaxy of aggregators could be agreed on, a whole number of aggregators could exist (just like RSS readers do). Doubtless Facebook and Friendfeed would jump at the opportunity. But we mustn’t make the same mistake we did with RSS, which is a one-way, non-conversational tool (unless you add things like the Disqus gReader plugin to be able to comment on stories and blogs from within your RSS reader).
Related:
- Has Elvis Costello inadvertently stumbled on the future direction of physical media retailing?
- News comes via Stereogum that Elvis Costello's new release will be the latest in a line of retail/marketing experiments from music artists rich enough to take the hit if it bombs (or music pirates run away with their product without so much as a 'thank you'). And, of course, experiments by those not rich enough to take the hit. Costello's wacky experiment will sell you a digital download code for his album, and then post you the package - WITHOUT the CD (presumably, you download it and burn it yourself). At first glance this seems like a pretty lame attempt to appeal to the digerati and be more contemporary. Wow, whoopee shit, he trusts people enough to let them burn their own CDs. Thanks Elvis! I never burned a CD before you allowed me to! [/sarcasm] But there's a lot more to it than that. Firstly, it acknowledges that now, digital > physical. The mp3 will get more plays than the CD. So save people the difficulty of ripping their CD, directly sell them the mp3 - but they've bought the whole album, not just their two favourite singles, and part of the value-added of an album is the physical...
- Seesmic buys a Twitter client: a big step for desktop micro-broadcasting
- So, overhyped social tool Seesmic has acquired the popular Twitter client, Twhirl. Desktop clients, have been an important part of its success, it's far less compelling to load up Twitter.com all the time. I hope Seesmic didn't pay much for Twirl: only so much as it would cost them to develop it in house, and not a cent more. Mainly that's because there are loads of Twitter clients out there, many very good, and the barriers to switching are largely nonexistent - in fact, alternative clients are advertised right within Twhirl (see right >>), powerful advertising since it's an implicit recommendation from your contacts. At least they get a good Adobe AIR coder, and some cross-selling opportunities to Twhirl users. Media for a long time pre-Internet was consolidated in the hands of huge, singular broadcasters like the BBC, TimeWarner, newspapers, radio stations. Now, members of the public can broadcast themselves (I won't pass judgement here as to whether that's particularly valuable to society... the techno-utopian says yes, the techno-cynic says no) When I post short blocks of text to Twitter, short posts on my blog, a quick video to YouTube, etc, I'm broadcasting myself in micro-format compared to the...
- Virgin Media anti-piracy: who’s the crook now, eh?!
- Virgin Media is looking to emulate the 'French model' of anti-piracy, big-label protective measures, which sees persistent (three strikes) offenders warned and then kicked off the network. This is old hat stuff but a complex issue. In the post below I make the case that society needs to be wary/cynical towards this announcement - moreso than our castrate mainstream media. Here's why: Firstly, I take issue with the deliberately misleading, but unfortunately mainstream, assumption that music pirates are costing the music industry (as opposed to major music labels) serious amounts of cash. Many (not all!) music pirates spend vast amounts of money on music - you can see the results of my ad hoc study as they come in, here and here. These pirates just don't spend it on the big releases from major labels, mainly because having access to vast (shared) libraries of music means you can find the obscure records you REALLY like. They also spend a lot of money on concerts, merchandise, and within specialist distribution platforms that big labels have yet to get into bed with, like eMusic. An argument could be made that the iPod and the iTunes Music Store have destroyed just as much...
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