Posts Tagged: mp3 music downloads

I’ll come clean any day – I’m addicted to music, and I’m proud of it. As much as I would like to get my MP3 music downloads off a torrent or a peer-to-peer site, I’m afraid that I’m going to be in hock for $100,000 the day I’m caught. So if there is any description that I’d like on my tombstone, it could be “an iPod addict who’d like nothing better to do find somewhere great for cheap or free MP3 music downloads”. Let’s get the free ones that I’ve discovered out of the way.  AOL Radio, SHOUTcast, AOL Music Weekly CD Listening Party and Spinner’s MP3 of the Day are wonderful for a couple of free crumbs every now and then. But for my regular stuff, this is where I go.

At first glance, Rhapsody looks like an offer that he could not possibly want more out of. You pay your few dollars (between $10 a month and $15 a month), and stream all the music you could ever want on your computer or your phone; they have nearly ten million songs, and all of it is practically in your mobile device at any time. You can even set up an online library right on Rhapsody to listen to your unlimited subscription downloads. If you want to own your MP3 music downloads, it’ll cost you something like 69 cents. So all of this seems fine; what is my gripe? To begin with, Rhapsody hates the Mac. You can use it on the Mac, but everything is so badly designed for anything but the PC. It also, the whole subscription streaming service ends up charging me several dollars every month for the rest of my life. I’ll never get a song the moment I stop paying. And may confine in a little secret? Those tantalizing unlimited subscription downloads? I never found out how to actually get them.

Grooveshark  is a great and innovative option; and the interface is basically that of a playlist; but it tries to turn you into your own DJ. It works perfectly, signing up is quick and painless, and you can look at what everyone else has on their playlist.

eMusic has about 7 million songs, and you get to buy songs to keep for about 41 cents each. What am I complaining about? You don’t buy  these mp3 music downloads
one at a time; you pay for 75 songs every month, whether you download them or not. And your quota doesn’t roll over to the following month.

Pandora is somewhat different; it finds out what you want, based on what you already like. It conjures this information based on its input from the Music Genome Project, and you even have an iPhone app to go with it. Pandora comes up with suggestions all the time, and once you understand which ones to use and which ones to leave alone, Pandora gives you great discoveries. You can buy the songs you want, and it’s cheap.

I happen to like Zune Pass best of all – sometimes even better than iTunes. You pay a flat $15 a month fee; you can listen and stream as much as your little heart desires, and you get 10 DRM free MP3 music downloads every month. To me, that’s a deal that can’t be beat.

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With the success of the iPod, Apple has just come to control 70% of the MP3 player market. It has cornered the market for digital downloads too – with iTunes. For all its popularity though, iTunes isn’t all pleasant from a user standpoint. It’s unnecessarily large, and what does one do about it the way it comes up with a new 60 MB update about twice a month? The updating process isn’t even as invisible as with the Google Chrome browser, that does all the updating it wants to behind the scenes without ever letting you in on the hassle of it all. The iTunes update is completely hands-on. And how about the laborious process you have to go through to sync it to the computer to get everything caught up? iTunes takes a lot of time just to recognize that anything has been plugged in; and then it can fail from time to time while it’s trying to update the iPod/iPhone. In the age of WiFi, why is it that Apple wants you to plug anything in?

Now this is not how Google feels things should be done. Watch out Apple, Google is on to you! Google’s Android-operated phones like the Nexus One, won’t require you to jump through any of these hoops. To begin with, the Android is completely wireless; you don’t need to plug it into the computer for anything. And now, the Android is going to let you install an app on your desktop that will allow you to upload to the Internet all the music you have on the computer. Once you have your music collection on the cloud, your WiFi-enabled Android phone will just stream your music wherever you have a WiFi connection. The music doesn’t get stored on your phone; it gets streamed, and you never know the difference. There’ll be no more MP3 music downloads for your mobile device; it’ll all be streamed, and it will all be live.

Did you happen to catch the news last year about how Apple acquired the music streaming company Lala? The new iPhone’s coming out, and Apple probably has an eye on the cloud to compete with Google. There are good things to say about this, and there are inconveniences to. To begin with, if you want to store your collection on the cloud, you don’t have to make do with 80GB or anything – you can have as many gigabytes as you want. The bad news in all of this is that you can’t listen to anything without an Internet connection. Certainly, the wireless Internet thing is getting better every day what with 4G and all. But still, how on earth are you to listen to your music when you’re on an underground train line, or if you’re out in the sticks? Of course, the new iTunes and Android will allow you to both sync and store stuff on your phone, alongside letting you stream from the cloud. Even better, Android’s WiFi is going to allow you to sync music wirelessly. You’ll just need to press a button when you get in the house, and it’ll do the rest for you.

Apple’s apps developers have tried to bring that kind of function to the iPhone, only to be rejected by Apple. Whatever that means. What it seems to me now is, that large storage on your phone and syncing everything all the time seems to be on its way out. Pretty soon, everything that could hold music or any other entertainment software will be able to stream from the cloud. This is certainly the next big thing in music players, and it could get very competitive. It could mean an end to iTunes; people want to stream to any device, and Apple will never allow it. It could also mean an end to iPod docks for cars. Manufacturers could just build a WiFi streaming chip into the car entertainment system, and you could have your entire collection right in your car without having to carry around your iPod. You could also have your music collection anywhere in the world that you traveled, if hotel entertainment systems carried such a streaming chip. Record labels that went through so much with the whole MP3 music downloads shift, are going to have all kinds of new regulations to hobble this innovation.

But as they did with MP3 music downloads when they removed DRM, they’ll probably come around to seeing sense in a few years, and then one day soon we will have our music just floating around the ether around us wherever we go. There will be no music storage – the last link to the idea that music and entertainment need some physical storage form to keep with you when you buy them.