Here We Go Again: The bright new future ahead where we can all share music in the cloud, NOT..

By David Greenberg.  Learn more about this outspoken industry veteran at the end of the post.

To the cloud. Google’s created MUSIC, a here-to-fore hush-hush (though everyone seemed to know about it) service to shunt all your music up to a locker in the cloud. Apple will soon have a Cloud iTunes too. Then you can play your music everywhere and anywhere on just about any device that the gods of I.T. allow it to. Though, right now Google’s only on Android and Apple’ll probably stick to the iPhone.

Here’s the best part: You may be able to share your music with your friends, family, step-children, and even ex-significant others. There will be an App for that. Maybe,

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The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In A Keynote

In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby’s catalog into the iTunes Music Store.

iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the major labels. Many of us in the music biz were not sure this idea was going to work. Especially those who had seen companies like eMusic do this exact same model for years without big success.

I flew to Cupertino thinking I’d be meeting with one of their marketing or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people from small record labels and distributors had also been invited.

We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect.

Then out comes Steve Jobs. Whoa! Wow.

He was in full persuasive presentation mode. Trying to convince all of us to give Apple our entire catalog of music. Talking about iTunes success so far, and all the reasons we should work with them.

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Music, community & file-sharing: from Napster to Ping

The launch of Ping, Apple’s new Facebook-meets-iTunes service, has once again underlined the somewhat novel idea that people want to chat and interact to a greater degree about the music they like. If it succeeds, it will be because people don’t just want access to music: they want to belong to a music community. 

In making predictions, it’s wise to look to the past. The tendency towards community isn’t surprising to anybody who has watched file-sharing evolve over the past decade. 

A (very) brief history of file-sharing 

The first wave of file-sharing, Napster, was a lonely affair: users searched and downloaded music through the central hub with as much social interaction as a simple Google search - i.e. none. You downloaded from a computer - whether there was a person in front of it was irrelevant. 

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