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?
- 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. But there's a lot more to it than that (...)...
- Last.fm taking major step towards becoming great big clever iTunes in the sky
- I just spent 10mins fiddling with the beta-test of the new Last.fm (you’ll need to be a subscriber to Last.fm to have a play - if you aren’t, come back later, I’ll update this post with some screenshots later today). I have to say, though their iconic design is gone (looking kinda Facebook-y now!), some of the customisation options are gone (for now), such as sliders to increase the obscurity/randomness of new bands it thinks you’ll like (if you’re feeling adventurous), this overall looks very promising and paints quite a clear picture for the future direction Last.fm is expected to take. The salient ‘new’ feature is the Library. I say ‘new’; the current iteration of Last.fm has largely the same functionality, but this redesign does it justice as an increasingly central feature of the service (whereas charts once were, as some people have complained). The Library, much like your iTunes, lists all songs you listen to, and your playlists. The new design incorporates a CoverFlow-like display of albums, or artists, for example. Unlike iTunes, this isn’t a list of your mp3’s - it’s any song you have listened to (that get ‘scrobbled‘, in last.fm parlance). This is a strong acknowledgement...
- 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: (...)...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Add New Comment
Viewing 3 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)