The Cloud Challenge

The last chapter of my dissertation talks about the move towards cloud based services for accessing and storing music. Services like Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, MP3Tunes, Grooveshark, Rhapsody, and others, though they differ in the details, all make use of the idea of the Internet as a storage space for the music they offer. Like the metaphor it relies on, the cloud promises omni-present access to music. But many subscription services or on-line streaming providers also impose limitations on that access, or at the very least, alter the nature of the relationship we have with our music collections.

One of the primary selling points of music in the cloud is access to a massive collection of songs for a relatively low price, if you compared how much it would actually cost to buy individual copies of everything the service provider offers. Paying for the service gives you instant access to more music most individuals would ever acquire on their own. While this makes it easier to get informed about a particular band, style, genre, or historical musical period, it also puts a greater distance between the consumer and their collection. Rather than carefully (or lazily) curated expressions of the self, music collections in the cloud are digital in the purest sense. They are an on/off switch, not a process the listener goes through.

As cloud services become more integrated into our everyday music listening habits, I've often wondered whether or not it could be a viable replacement for a music collection that was located at a more tangible distance to me, either on my CD shelves or on my hard drive. Turns out I'm not the only one wondering.

Check out this this link. It's a challenge to see if you can live off the cloud for all your music needs for the next week or month or something. There are a few rules that go along with it...be sure to adhere to #8, which is both the funniest and most difficult.

Good luck. If anyone makes it through 7 days let me know. I used Rdio for about 4 days and then lost interest. Staring at clouds can be fun, but it gets a little too nebulous when they always remain at an ethereal distance.