Everything, directed by few

Imagine: an entire world drawing from the same all-encompassing music collection. (For the vast majority of music listeners, the always-growing iTunes is all-encompassing.) In a way that brushes creepiness, the cloud represents a music listening singularity: radio, mixtapes, albums, singles, obscurities, all of it. And for that tactile ownership experience that mp3s didn’t offer anyhow, we still have records—yes, expect sales of actual vinyl records to balloon even more. For the vast majority of other listening, this is it. In a few years, expect mp3s to be as archaic as CDs, and not even around long enough to have irony value.
NICK CURLY @ KRYSHA MIRA, MOSCOW 09.09.11 by nickcurly
It’s difficult to know what all of this might mean for the currently existing music cloud. That’s basically Pandora and MOG. The latter is probably most similar to what Apple will unveil: a combination of Pandora-style algorithmic radio station—that is, a very complicated computer program makes a playlist based on your likes and dislikes—and stream-at-will listening of tracks, albums, and playlists. Probably mix in some social networking while we’re at it, a la last.fm.
So, a listener can be their own DJ, sort of be their own DJ (via the algorithm), or go for the sweet authoritarianism of the traditional radio DJ via someone else’s playlist. What’s to stop whole new sorts of “radio” stations from forming as playlists in the cloud? Like Podcasts, but track-by-track mixes, with no downloading, and with recognizable brand names. As Frere-Jones says, “In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio.”



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