With things like iCloud and Spotify becoming readily available, what are the advantages and disadvantages of keeping your music and other devices not locally available? I would assume one disadvantage would be no access without wi-fi, while an advantage would be saving HD/SSD room. What else is there? Do yoiu think people will even be able to keep their music locally (on a drive) or will they have to stream/do whatever Cloud does with it? Do you think that movies will ever be available in this fashion?
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MacBook Air and the Future of Media
- Thread starter biodigitaljazz
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I'm not sure if iCloud is meant to be a streaming service - I get the impression it's more to help you backup / sync your music across devices, which will continue to keep hard copies of mp3s on the drive for you unless you tell it not to. I think iCloud is there to support local-file storage, not replace it.
With the Spotify service you don't actually buy any of the music, just access to it. Because there's no way anyone could possibly store everything available through Spotify, it has to be streamed. It's more like a premium radio station.
I don't think people will ever catch on to the idea of buying (or acquiring by other means
) songs that are only available streamed through the internet, that is, unless the internet becomes crazy-fast and available absolutely everywhere.
With the Spotify service you don't actually buy any of the music, just access to it. Because there's no way anyone could possibly store everything available through Spotify, it has to be streamed. It's more like a premium radio station.
I don't think people will ever catch on to the idea of buying (or acquiring by other means
) songs that are only available streamed through the internet, that is, unless the internet becomes crazy-fast and available absolutely everywhere.Well I use Google Music and Pandora. I sync any of the artists that I can listen to over and over and over again on my iPod then the extra amount gets sync'd to Google Music. I pretty much only listen to it there when I'm working out of my "office" (home) and have internet available. Will it replace local storage? Not any time soon. I mean AT&T doesn't even get coverage anywhere near my house, not a big deal since I use Google Voice and it goes to my Gmail Chat. But until internet is available everywhere at an affordable price, it's just a nice way to store extra junk for now. Of course, if you do have internet wherever you go, it may be different for you then.
Big disadvantage: The cellphone companies that offer these wireless plans want to charge everyone an arm and a leg for anything they can. That's why tablets are being promoted so heavily. That's why smartphones are being promoted so heavily. And that's why Cloud technology is being promoted so heavily by Apple, Microsoft, and other major companies.
I don't think people will ever catch on to the idea of buying (or acquiring by other means
This is kind of what I meant. If you have a real nice internet connection and can stream the music you want to listen to anytime for $5 a month, couldn't it put internet music STORES out of business; theoretically?
I agree with this theory considering personally I tend to get tired of popular songs after I listen to it so many times and have next to no use of the file afterward except to take up precious space on my internal hard drive.