Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Please let me *not* own my music. On Spotify, SoundCloud.
According to Steve Jobs people still want to own their music. Lately I’ve been asking both friends and strangers if they really want to own music, and I have to say that I’m not sure about if Mr. Jobs is right, at least not for much longer. In fact I think he knows that he is wrong, but he won’t admit that for a while…
It seems as if we’re in some sort of transition period regarding ownership of music today. My impression is that people, at least in countries where mobile broadband has really started to take off, e.g. the Nordics, have started to realise that what’s important no longer is owning music, but owning access to it. And I think we are nearing a tipping point in this matter.
Many friends of mine have been managing their own growing digital collections of music for quite some time now. A few years ago, the amount of data and files the average music “enthusiast” had to manage passed the point where a database model for organizing files started to make more sense than simply dropping files in folders on the filesystem. iTunes emerged as one of the best music library managers out there, with its great handling of searching, playlist tools, and more. Most people I know with large collections of music moved to iTunes, or similar systems.
To date, these people still “own” their music, at least if you define ownership as including stolen goods. After all, about 99% of my friends’ huge harddrives are filled with illegally downloaded music…
So, how many people have digital collections of music these days? Quite a few I’m sure, but my mother, who is a professional musician, certainly does not. She got an iPod not too long ago, but when I showed her how to convert her CD:s into digital files she realised immediately that it would take her far too much time and effort to convert her gigantic CD collection into an iPod-friendly format. It didn’t help when I told her she had to be careful managing the massive amounts of data this would result in, or else her collection could vaporize! Laptop drives do crash, music collections with hundreds of hours of work and years of collecting material behind them do vanish into thin air every now and then. This already happened to a good number of friends, and to myself. Have I learned anything? Do I keep a backup these days? No. Shame on me.
So, why do almost every music lover I know have their own mp3-libraries still? And, more interestingly, why do the non-techy, non-music nerd people I know increasingly listen to music through services such as YouTube and Last.fm with the amount of music sitting on their harddisks actually declining?
I think I know why. Managing your own music collection in a digital world really only means securing access. Hence it’s not really about owning, but owning the access to a certain set of files. It’s your own little realm in the giant p2p net.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the managing of your music collection can be outsourced. In other words, you don’t have to keep your own collection of music these days, somebody else can do it for you. It’s actually a rather old idea, but it’s finally becoming a reality. And the people with other things on their minds than just music are “leapfrogging”!
It takes quite a bit of time to manage your own music library, and it’s risky too. That’s why this only makes sense if you have enough time on our hands devoted to collecting music. If you don’t, it is much more rational to outsource.
What if you could keep your iTunes-like interface and still have access to the playlists you so tediously put together over the years? The answer is: you can.
How, you ask? Spotify is part of the answer. It is the slickest application for managing your music (yes, it’s still your music) I’ve seen so far. And yet there’s no music on your harddrive, all of it sits on Spotify’s servers. And it’s legal. A search for Michael Jackson yields his entire catalog. Pick and choose the songs you need for your playlist. Hit play, and the song starts playing immediately. Believe it or not, it feels faster than iTunes.
Get an early beta account if you can. You’ll be blown away.
What one realises when the file managment/ownership issues are out of the way is that the only really important things are your playlists. What songs do you listen to and in what combination and when? And you also begin to see that there are lots of possibilities to evolve music listening now that your music collection lives on the web, side by side with all your friends’ collections. That brings me to what we’re doing at SoundCloud, the company I’m starting, but this post is already too long! So I will have to promise you to talk more about that in the next post.
What’s he building in there?
“What’s he building in there, what’s he building in there?” is the question Tom Waits keeps asking in his famous song with the same name (last.fm, Spotify). The question readers of this blog may ask from time to time is the same, namely “what exactly is Eric building down in Berlin”? Well, as we’re closing in on the (semi-)public launch of the Cloud I hope to find the time to blog a bit here about what exactly it is we’re doing in Berlin. I also hope to put down some of the thoughts that have been occupying my mind in recent times. Stay tuned!
MacBook Air
So finally Apple has released the laptop I have been longing for since 2003, and it’s neither called MacBook Nano nor Thin, but Air. So, there we have it: the world’s first beautiful subnotebook.
The only problem is, I won’t buy it. At least not the first revision. I have a black MacBook since almost two years now, and buying a MacBook Air would be a downgrade. CPU is slower, hard drive too (unless I’d pay up EUR800 for an SSD, that is), graphics card too, RAM is the same (just when I started craving for more…), and, heck, my MB disk almost is twice the size of the SSD. Looks like More’s law has stopped working.
Meanwhile the new Lenovo apparently has most of what I had wanted to see in the Air; 4GB RAM, 2GHz, 13.3′ 1440*900, 3G card, and weighs… less.
C’Mon Apple, you can beat ‘em. My credit card is ready for you.
2008 Web Tech Predictions
Here are some bold predictions for next year (while listening to Scriabin’s Op. 8/No. 12 on repeat in the San Francisco sun, so you’ll have to bear with me here…):
- The proliferation of Single page webapps (SPA:s)
- OAuth gets support from some major players (Google, Yahoo, etc) which leads to some really interesting inter-webapp mashups
- Gmail sort of kills Facebook for many mainstream users (by offering status updates, some kind of social graph interface, etc)
- A handful of OpenSocial apps get a surprising amount of traction, with more exposure than any single social network
- Spotify is a smash hit, and people in areas with mobile broadband (like Scandinavia) start to realise they won’t have to download music, ever again
- Twitter gets aquired, possibly by Yahoo (who I’m sure will do better in 2008)
- Flash 9 “Moviestar release” kills Joost
- Wikia kills Google (ok, I don’t really believe this will happen, but it sure would be interesting…)
UPDATE: Here are some more 2008 predictions from the latest What’s Next panel with Henrik, Joakim, Tomas and me (In Swedish, sorry!)
A few impressions from the first day of SIME07
- Alexander Bard had a point talking about “talent-generated content” in the first conversation. Unfortunately he really didn’t seem to get SoundCloud when I spoke to him later (SoundCloud is really about talent-generated…). He was rambling about the secret sauce about being an A&R, which is not really what the cloud is about. That man may be clever, but he’s getting older…
- The only conference in recent times where the Wifi didn’t make trouble was Hej! 07. I remember having trouble on all other conferences I attended since then… Is it that hard? Without Internet these kind of conferences are a pain. It also kills both backchannels and many of the potential IRL meetings.
- The SoundCloud / Le Choix (Let me know if you want an invite) / Radon concept seems to work. There’s been two remixes of the SIME Theme anthem this far, and the main mix is coming a long nicely.
- The talks have not been terribly interesting, unfortunately. Not sure the artistic ambition mixes too well with the very corporate feel of many presentations.
- Less than 5% of the crowd knew about Creative Commons. And these people are in the media business? I thought that was sort of baseline knowledge by now. Or is the problem that CC does not really have much relevance for big media.
Google buys Jaiku
Too many phone calls and IM messages have prevented me from blogging about this sooner, but a personal favorite piece of social software that I use on a daily basis–yes, it’s Jaiku–has been bought by Google at an undisclosed sum (Some remarks by me in the post). Congratulations goes out to Jyri and the whole Jaiku team. Wow!
Being 100% rational…
…I just pre-ordered the new Radio Head album for £1.00. I don’t think the set-your-own-price scheme is going to work at scale.
Jeff Barr on S3/EC2/SQS
I attended a workshop/presentation by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr yesterday at RUG-B, and thought I’d share some “insider” info about AWS that is not so easy to come by on the web.
- Amazon currently has 260k developer accounts in their network. More than I thought.
- Hierarchical filesystems is inherently hard to simulate on s3 as it’s a fully distributed system (no global locks, among other things). So we might not get satisfactory performance out of those abstraction layers anytime soon. Instead, Barr suggests, we should start thinking about new, web-savvy mass storage architectures. ElasticDrive and Nirvanix are intersting players to watch.
- Although Barr did not mention a specific release date, I think we should expect a european S3 datacenter very soon. That is good news since s3 performance in Europe is currently rather poor. Currently S3 runs on a couple of data centers (or rings, actually) in the U.S.
- We will have to take care of CDN integration ourselves for now, but there might also be support for that in S3 in the future.
- We can expect more flexible EC2 configurations in the future. Both smaller and larger VM:s will be possible.
- A “placement”-API will enable admins to place servers either very close to one another (same rack, for speed) or very far apart (for stability/security) in the future. Very cool.
- There’s a nifty Firefox extension for controlling EC2 instances built by the EC2 team.