Why Do We Need A Music Library For The Cloud Era?
Back in the 90's most of the songs we discovered listening to the hertzienne radio, friends’ walkman, following TV charts or reading specialized magazines. After a song hit our curiosity and contaminated our brain, the next logical step was to ride to our favorite record store to buy the CD. Heading back home we couldn’t stop thinking about the pleasure of opening the jewel-case, touch and smell the paper album-cover before leaving the piece of art on the shelf of our wooden library, completing our collection. Sharing happened physically at school during a quick break with mates or at home with fellow music lovers picking up songs from the gold mine library. Emotion and engagement moved around he physicality of the object.
Late 90's peer-to-peer file-sharing services hit the music market. All the music we wanted was now one click and a few kilobits away. For some people, the ultimate goal was downloading as many songs as they could for free. It seriously kicked the music industry but offered a new perspective for listeners: unlimited access to music. Emotion was not part of the equation except maybe the feeling of excitement from watching download progress bars jerky completing up. All the albums we illegally downloaded from obscure peers were stored in our cold hard-drive. Files sharing happened through USB MP3 players, copy/paste/drag & drop tracks files. It was a far cry from our poetic physical library.
Riddled by lawsuits, peer-to-peer networks were finally forced to shutdown. Then, in early 2001, Apple came out with the legendary iPod, and its library, iTunes: clean design, seamless integration of the buying and listening experience with the music device hardware. People went mad with the iPod transferring the joy from the physicality of the CD to the container.
The whole fashionable-portable-audio-player phenomena is very much of a piece with the enjoyment of records, except that it’s not a subcultural phenomenon, and certainly doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of aestheticism that comes with being a record collector. — Jonathan Sterne
But Merging the iPod device with the iTunes library had a cost: lock-in the user, force slow sync and friction in the sharing process.
2008 marked the beginning of the shift from MP3 download to streaming access. Spotify and Deezer came out with a new disruptive distribution model offering on-demand listing of 30 million tracks from record labels’ catalogs. We’ve never before been able to access music so simply, legally. No need to visit your record store or to download any file. No synch needed anymore. All the music in the cloud. Accessible from any computer, anytime with an account. Streaming services revolutionized the way we access music but still fail at engaging music lovers on the same emotional level as the physical library, recordings or the colorful iPod Nano.
I strongly believe that streaming services devalue music, simply because we’re not as invested — neither physically nor emotionally — in the recordings — Elliot Jay Stocks
Finally, the music distribution evolved far beyond this model. 2014: the amount of new music that pops up on the internet and that we can discover today is bigger than ever before. The web is the widest source of music and one of the most direct and powerful channel for emerging and major artists to engage with their fans. Youtube, SoundCloud let any band, singer, producer or beat maker push a song online. Social networks, although they’re definitely not designed for music, let people share their discoveries with friends and music folks. Music lovers become music hunters with the excitation of discovering new unknown, obscure and thrilling tracks everyday.
We hear music everywhere, but we can’t collect it in any real sense, which is annoying, because having a well-manicured library of alphabetized music that you love rules, and almost nobody has been able to do that properly since the ’90s. — Eliot Van Buskirk
From a fan perspective, the problem is not accessing tracks anymore, it’s collecting them. The music is fragmented and unstable. Our favorites electronic covers are on SoundCloud, our latest video clips are on Youtube. We discover new tracks following artists on Twitter and Facebook, Friends’ Tumblrs or music blogs. It’s real time: a few minutes and our favorite songs are gone with the social flow of short messages, photos and lolcats videos. How do we collect music in the cloud era? What is the place to store all of the tracks we love? Like we used to do with our physical or MP3 library?
The ubiquity of online music hosting now means that friends can post single tracks to their Tumblr, and we can spy on what they’re listening to through Facebook feeds, though we might not be able to download them. These ephemeral glimpses at others’ listening habits are fascinating and inspiring, but unstable. The thing about clouds is you never own them — they have an instinctive tendency to drift away. MP3s, obsolete as they may become, stick around. — Kyle Chayka
We music lovers need a platform that fit our new discovery habit. The Internet has offered every connected people the opportunity to find out new songs. Someone has to offer them a place to collect, organize and share all of their loving tracks, in one place, whatever the source and the discovery platform.
Music is a part of who we are, help us to express our personality, emotions and interact with each other. The format and access have changed over time (Vinyl, CD, MP3 file, Streaming) but our favorite tracks remain the most precious things we own and feel. We’ll always deserve a place to keep and wonderfully present them to the world. At the age of streaming, the new music library will empower listeners as collectors through curation and personalization, bringing back emotions and the feeling of ownership. The music library evolves overtime but will always remain our home to collect and share all of our discoveries in a beautiful, engaging and emotionally manner.
