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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).

Technorati Tags: social media,iTunes,streaming,social web,Twtitter,aggregators,liftreaming

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ryan Catbird

I can't think of any true, hard evidence for a decline in needing to "own" music beyond observing the physical sales decline and steady increase in digital music use. True, digital music today still represents "owning" (in fact, it's the same type of "owning" that Jobs was talking about)-- but going from "all my music resides on this hard drive I carry with me" to "all my music resides on this Hard Drive In The Sky" is a much shorter leap than was the one from all-physical (CDs) to digital (MP3s).

I think you're OTM about the Last.FM profile usurping the role of "hey, look at my music collection." There's a certain type of social interaction that used to involve having people 'round to your apartment where they could peruse your collections of music, books, and videos. Ostensibly, you'd curated all these collections to sort of offer some kind of insight about you. And these collections really had to be managed, if for no other reason than the sheer limitations of your physical space; you can only store so many CDs.

But, nowadays, all these types of interactions take place online (Facebook, Last.FM, Twitter, etc.)-- and there are no longer any real limitations on physical space. 10 years ago, if you saw someone's music collection, and it was heavy on, say, Black Flag, Fugazi, the Dead Kennedys... you could glean quite a bit of information about this person, from their preferred method of dress to their political leanings. But today, simply seeing a person's iTunes Library won't tell you anything at all, really... A person's iTunes library now is likely to have not only Black Flag and Fugazi, but also Britney Spears and MC Hammer, Pavarotti and Leadbelly, Johnny Cash and Slayer. And that doesn't tell you anything, other than "this person likes to have options."

It's not about "what have you got?" anymore, it's about "what are you listening to?" and more specifically, "what are you listening to RIGHT NOW?"
Ryan Catbird

I agree completely that wireless streaming is rapidly becoming the obvious choice for future music consumption. Convenience typically trumps all else, and having to manage multi-gig libraries of music across various devices is starting to become a real chore. As long as users can hear what they want, when they want, they don't care about "owning" the music anymore.

Steve Jobs was right when, years ago, he said, "People want to OWN their music" -- but that was several years ago... I don't think it's true now. And it will become less and less true as we move forward.
Philippe Bradley

It's interesting though to ask whether it's true that people no longer want to own their music. People have taken great pride in their music collections for a long time. Firstly, what's the evidence that this change has happened; if so, what's the substitute for this vanity in the age of the Great Big Jukebox In The Sky?

I wonder if a listener profile - i.e. Last.fm - and number of followers, i.e. people who think you have great taste in music because they can see that profile - can make up for the lack of ownership, psychologically? I.e. building a profile, instead of a physical collection?