As I write, Emusic is is negotitations to be sold to Best Buy or Rhapsody. EMusic is a major distributor of alterntaive MPs.
Emusic, a coupla times larger than LaLa, is a subscription service providing a limited amount of mp3s for a monthly flat fee.
If the deal falls through, Emusic plans to buy its own streaming music company, somebody like Grooveshark, where for for a monthly amount you can stream all of the music in their catalogue. The difference between streaming and mp3s is self-evident: you don’t own streaming songs, you do own mp3s.
There is one last piece of the puzzle. Streaming music is not mobile: you can’t download it anywhere. But eventually a deal will be cut with Apple and it will be like renting a movie on Itunes. You can use it for awhile and then it’ll be gone.
Streaming is very inexpensive and may well beat out mp3s except: a consumer society, and certainly a music lover, likes to own what they’re paying for. With music it is not merely the difference between renting and buying, it is the difference between collecting music, being a musical philatelist if you like, and being a casual music listener.
It might, as Julie Burchill once noted, be a little pathetic, but it is no less real for its infantalism. Some people, like me, obsess about music and we need to own the product.
However, a causal fan, viz the vast majority of the human race, might be fine with streaming music. But what happens, if money is tight, or they loose their job, anything like that: essentially, they will immediately loose their entire investment.
People talk about what the 00s were about musically. The 00s were about distribution the way the 80s were about nusic videos. Other things have happened and are happening but in the final end the most important musical movement at the moment is how streaming and mp3s shake out. At the least, it might not have the sonic toxicity Mike Nessing wants (Mike is right about vinyl sales raising: but they are raising from nothing to a coupla 100K, vinyl is dead) but that is where sales or rentals of recorded music will and shall occcur.
Yep, vinyl is dead, and CDs are nearly dead. And Mp3s could very well die.