Online Radio Vs Apple

Submitted by: Trentuj Dudley

If you’re like me, incorporating some form of music as part of your daily routine adds to great well being and overall positive ‘Mo-Jo.’ Regrettably, as we all get older and go through the numerous phases of life, priorities shift along with the time commitment to keep abreast of the latest and greatest music falls lower on the list. Then we wake up one day, and understand music is no longer a component of our daily life aside from the short commute to and from work. This doesn’t include the reality – how out of touch we turn out to be with the newest and greatest artists.

On October 23, 2001 the iPod came up out. Shortly thereafter, we all went by way of the procedure (or enjoyed our children do it) of learning tips on how to ‘rip’ our CD collection into digital music (MP3, AAC, etc.) stored locally on our computers. We were then in complete mobile music bliss taking our iPods to the gym and enjoying our old collections of music. Thank you Apple for becoming productive at selling us these devices; we love them. By the actual end of Q3 2009, Apple sold 218,048,000 iPods. A huge number.

In 2000, the Music Genome Project birthed with probably the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical info ever collected. It represents over eight years of analysis by a trained team of musicologists, and spans everything all of the way back to the Renaissance and Classical music. Nowadays several persons (which includes me) use and love the effective commercial-free Web Radio service referred to as Pandora, based upon the Music Genome Project. Although I could not get my hands on public data showing the exact quantity of registered (internet and iPhone, Palm, Blackberry, Android, etc.) users of Pandora, I can assure you the numbers are quite big. There’s another highly-popular Web Online Radio service called Last.FM, which gives a comparable or improved (depending on who you talk with) limitless genre/artist-specific music knowledge. Both these free (ad-supported) or low price (roughly $30-$40/year) paid services permit users to decide on genre or artist-based channels to appreciate on a computer, mobile device, or house music system (ex. Sonos.) Net net, Web online Radio services are in strong growth setting and building substantial and loyal audiences.

So, who still will buy and downloads music upon online radio their iPod and iPhone?

The short answer is – a great deal of men and women. However, the recent digital music numbers from Nielsen Sound Scan aren’t showing healthy growth. A lot more specifically, digital music sales is in double digit decline in comparison to prior years. Some argue the culprits being the latest variable pricing strategy and depressed ringtone sales. Plus, CD sales also continue to drop, fast.

Steve Jobs stands by his strategy that men and women like to own their Online radio music, as opposed to rent. Looking at the numbers – he does make a great point. As of this post, iTunes is currently obtainable in 23 countries with 8.5 billion songs sold, and 100 million credit card billing accounts. Jobs claims iTunes is the largest music retailer in the world. To that end they go on to improve iTunes with the recent launch of Version 9.

Although I have over 100 gigs of digital music, I dislike having to continuously decide on songs or albums to play. In fact, that’s why Online Radio works. Jobs solution to this is “Genius Mixes,” a feature included in recent versions of iTunes that (if you allow it to) collects information and facts about your digital collection of music. It then runs your data against the 27 million libraries (or 54 billion songs) submitted to iTunes via Genius to customize a playlist suggestion specifically for you based upon the available music you’ve got on your pc. It’s really pretty great.

Actually with the new feature improvements to iTunes, I expect digital music and Online radio download sales growth to slow down due to the fact of the growing popularity of commercial-free World wide web Online Radio. Having nearly each song out there on my mobile phone, on my property stereo Online Radio, or at my pc – commercial totally free for $36/year can be a compelling proposition particularly since I do not have to buy songs individually, actively discover new music, manage or store downloaded files, or play DJ. To that end, I suspect, over time, you might see Apple use Genius in some way to offer a subscription service.

What do you think – buy or rent?

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