to be honest, i'm probably gonna be the minority, but i heard about this a while ago, and to me, it feels like a money making pie that i bet a lot of the big music publishing companies have a finger in. They have been losing sales on vinyl, cd's (actual hard copy purchases) to the digital revolution for a long time and are probably looking at other avenues to make their cash under the disguise of "customer convenience".
QUALIFIER:
I'm a professional musician and music tutor (for a living) so i have overtly strong opinions on stuff like this, so take that with a grain of salt. There are a lot of things about the music industry which piss me off as it is so good at pulling the wool over the consumer's eyes.
eg: It's completely possible for an "artist" (used loosely in this day and age) to have a number one selling song or album without a single copy being owned by anyone. People automatically make the perceived link that they must have sold a lot of copies, but it's more to do with how many copies are shipped to the record store.
If a music publishing company want's to have a number one, they simply need to press more copies and have them shipped to the record store where it is hoped that they get snapped up.
Record company's no longer make money of cd's or vinyl, but has anyone noticed the huge increase of band's touring over the last few years? Seems like every week there's another "big name" band coming out. Which is fantastic of course, but the motive behind it isn't "oh they must love australia sooooo much", it's more like "our fucken record company is pushing us to come out and spend 5 years on the road touring 'cause they have to make more money off of us".
The whole music cloud thing reeks of the same mentality forced onto the consumer. This is the way music is heading, and most likely the future of how we have to pay for, store, and listen to music. The consumer thinks "it's awesome, i don't have to actually store music on my own machine, i don't have to worry about the massive pain in the arse of spending 60 seconds importing a track, i can just access it up here"....I don't see it as convenience, i see it as a huge headfuck, when i won't be able to access my music at all when there are problems with the server, prob's with my internet connection, some other problem with licensing that thinks i don't "own" that copy of the track...I wan't a real product for my money. I love going to a cd store and actually spending 10mins or 10 hours looking through all the cd's and walking away with "something".
Can't help but think it's just another sad way that we as a society are gonna get screwed on. Every one loves itunes, media player, online digital downloads, torrents etc for their music, but it's shithouse quality people.....It's being going downhill fast. Vinyl was fantastic (very brittle and easy to break though) but shit it sounds good on a good system. CD's can sound good, but they do sound digital (obviously) and lose a lot of the warmth of the original recording. MP3's and other digital file types are crap. Of course i use them though - it's almost compulsory in my job, but i'm not happy about it. There is so much quality missing in digital files it's ridiculous, and i fear that something like this "service" is only gonna dumb down our earbuds....
I reckon it's like the K&K version of music.
rant over, as i said, i have overly strong opinions on anything like this, and i'm not out to offend anyone or change opinions, just trying to educate on where a lot of "musicians" feel the industry is going.
