The Cloud Bringing Music Back to a Shared Experience

Originally posted at The Trend and Foresight Blog by Cyrus Sussman and Chris Carbone.

Listening to music has always been a social activity—whether you’re talking about songs being sung around the fires of pre-history or revelers crowded around a gramophone during the Harlem Renaissance.

For the last 3-4 decades, though, the pendulum has been swinging the other way as walkmans, MP3 players, and a la carte music libraries like iTunes made music a more solitary experience shared between you and your earbuds. Sure concerts, clubs, and co-listening still endured, but the fragmentation and individualization of the musical experience are undeniable.

Sharing music, Roman style - Ed Yourdon (flickr)

But the tide seems to be shifting again, and the success of music services like Spotify—as well as lesser known alternatives such as Rdio and RIM's new BBM service—demonstrates the onset of another era of music: one ruled by socially-driven, cloud-based streaming music services.

If you want to quickly get up to speed, check out Soldier Knows Best’s review of Spotify. It simply and effectively explains the vast potential of Spotify’s cloud-based technology.

A host of up and coming new services utilize a similar approach—rather than selling individual tracks or albums to customers, they offer up their entire streaming library to their customers. Spotify’s library, as an example, is free to basic users, but charges a subscription fee for other features like mobile device compatibility—which has evolved to become a highly sought after feature by today’s consumers accustomed to anywhere, anytime media consumption. In fact, a Targetspot survey recently revealed that 45% of internet radio users tune in using a mobile device.

The most revolutionary aspect of these services, however, are the social foundation that they are increasingly built upon. Online listening rooms are emerging...and Facebook is hoping to become the “connective tissue” between different cloud music services. And since it won’t allow cross-service sharing of full songs, this Evolver.fm post suggests that the way “Facebook has set up music sharing will encourage a single winner to emerge among the existing music subscriptions. And that winner will be whichever music service first gains critical mass among Facebook users as the way to share music.”

Let’s see if this forecast plays out, but in the meantime we can all begin to enjoy the fact that social networking and the cloud are going to direct music back to its roots as a shared experience.