themusicvoid  

Those of you yet unfamiliar with the term, cloud computing refers to the concept of the web as an abstract cloud providing you with access to data and services without having to rely on a local system for more than connecting to the internet.

According to Gartner and their recently released “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies” report, cloud computing is currently at the peak of its hype cycle and will soon be dethroned from its position as the king of technologies for inflated expectations, taking over our digital lives and transforming into a mainstream technology in the next two to five years.

Despite its trendy aura, cloud computing is hardly anything new in the world of technology, neither is it for the music industry that saw their catalogues flying into the stormy clouds of peer-to-peer networks ten years ago. Cloud computing is merely a culmination of existing technologies that have been in the public domain for a while. Essentially, innovation is occurring on the level of service provision and transformation of consumer behavior in the digital space. We have all already adopted a great deal of cloud services in our digital lifestyle such as webmail, Google documents, web hosting and social networking, storing anything from cash flow spreadsheets to holiday memories. But what does cloud computing mean to the music business?

Business starts in the clouds
Digital “clouds” affect the music industry on many different levels and apart from the obvious product-to-service transition shaking up the music business in recent times. It also affects the ongoing decade-long war against the illegal cloudification of copyrighted songs. TMV believes the value of the cloud lies in its innate ability to act as a nursery ground for music technology startups.

A few years back, launching a new company operating in the sphere of music technology was inevitably dependent on raising substantial investment in order to employ a department of IT professionals looking after system development, security, storage maintenance as well as purchasing enormously expensive server equipment to host the company’s content and websites. This proved a major barrier to young entrepreneurs with limited access investor circles whereby they could transform a great idea into a great service.

Cloud computing has certainly provided a viable alternative for new startups, putting more power and control in the hands of creative business minds such as the group of fresh university graduates running the new music streaming service Mixcloud. CTO Matthew Clayton spoke on the ‘First Tuesday” panel. He stated that putting their business “in the cloud” enabled them to take a fresh idea off the ground with very minimal investment – as they effectively outsourced the functions and costs related to hiring an IT department, to the cloud provider.

Through the cloud, new startups can effectively bring a service to the market as soon as a new business opportunity is identified, which is an issue of crucial importance to companies operating in the fast paced and constantly changing digital landscape. Everybody can start developing a product immediately using the pay-as-you-go model of cloud services. This provides a great deal of flexibility for a company that needs to adapt dynamically and rapidly scale up.

Furthermore, storing data in the cloud provides a much greater level of security compared to the protection measures a startup business can afford to implement locally (as can be witnessed by TMVs own situation last week when our site was hacked). Usually service providers have large teams of highly experienced security experts that are impossible to employ on a tight budget. This is great news for companies that have to assure the traditionally super-protective record companies that their content will not be subject to unauthorized access and illegal sharing due to security breaches with a service provider’s platform.

Tunes into the clouds
Music in the cloud, albeit not a new concept, has recently become the hottest topic in the music business with the new wave of ad-funded free music streaming services growing like mushrooms within the digital landscape. And while industry executives scratch their heads trying to work out a strategy to cannibalize illegal downloads. Little own whether the miniscule streaming rates are able to balance out for the loss of record sales from this new generation of streaming converts.

The blogosphere has been heating up with speculations in the eve of the next Apple event where Steve Jobs is expected to announce the new iTunes 9 rumored to offer social integration with the biggest social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc and the new standard for extended album content Cocktail. Leaving the social concerns aside we fear that the Cocktail standard might pose a challenge at least for the users enjoying listening to music on one of the 30 million iPhones sold to date. Along with album artwork the extended content features will inevitably include videos, which can very quickly eat up a lot of valuable disk space in comparison to storing a library of MP3 files on the limited capacity portable device. So a move to the cloud is inevitable for iTunes and TMV will be surprised if Apple doesn’t serve their Cocktail via “ the cloud”.

The whole point of Cocktail is to encourage fans to interact with additional media content. If they don’t deliver it to the internet enabled mobile devices, where music consumers spent most listening time, without evading the limited storage space, it would be highly unlikely that the Cocktail will have a molotov effect. At least on my album downloads.

Furthermore, iTunes have been steadily increasing their video over the last couple of years. Anyone that has taken on this development has no doubt struggled to decide what to do with the videos they bought once their hard disk is full. Not to mention difficulties associated with organizing and maintaining a large library of music, migrating a record collection to a new computer or portable devices. All of these problems could be resolved if iTunes made the decision to move its content offering into the cloud.

On a separate note, its worth mentioning that placing music library’s in the cloud may finally convert a lot of new music consumers, who previously refused to develop digital download habits as a result of concern related to the perishability of MP3 files. If you happen to lose your music library, Apple allows you to recover all the songs purchased from iTunes one more time, but what happens if your computer fails once again?

Time to migrate
The rapid invasion of web enabled smartphones and the new generation of broadband internet rolling out during 2010 in the UK will inevitably drive more music and fans to the cloud in the years to come and speed the transition from ownership to access of music. Hopefully for the good of the industry. The technology industry is quickly embracing cloud standards across the board. With last year’s launch of Microsoft Azure we have witnessed the large players are steadily course moving higher into the clouds. TMV does hope that the traditionally, technologically conservative music industry giants will adopt these new developments in the digital skies.