I just read a NY Times piece about the drivers behind the rapid growth of XM and Sirius radio. XM just crossed 5 million subscribers.
It seems to me that there is something that is humanly manageable about the idea of a hundred or so channels, ad-free, each dedicated to a different genre or theme. My rental car in San Jose last month had XM, and I liked it. I rapidly found a few channels that I liked, and was surprisingly happy listening to them.
I’ve spent years messing about with .mp3s. First, ripping all of my music (12 months of daily CD swapping). Then figuring out an in home distribution system (thank you Slim Devices). Sorting out server storage and backup, so I don’t lose all that work. Now, I’ve got all this content, but I haven’t had a moment to sit down and think about playlists, etc. In fact, it’s enough work to load up new music in my portable player that I often go for months listening to the same songs when I’m jogging.
All of which to say something that should be obvious, but took me a while to learn — that it is a real profession to obtain, manage, categorize, select and “spin” music in a pleasing, fresh, agreeable manner. People should be paid for this. I’ve learned (as has my family), that a) it’s time consuming, and b) I’m not good at it.
Satelite radio is on to this.
Of course, the ultimate evolution is IP radio —
- all music ever recorded exists in the cloud (at the service edge),
- you hire or subscribe to a virtual or real DJ, also in the cloud, that you like
- you groove to the stream
Replication of content at the user edge, and all the software for ripping, manageing, etc. is ultimately an inefficient use of human resources …
To get to the end state, we need something like peer-to-peer with endpoint encryption, but that’s a blog for another day.