My Relationship with Music

Almost 10 years ago, I digitized my music collection.

I used to have cases and cases of CDs on display in my room in college. I only knew a couple of people who had more music than I did.

Technology has changed all of that. After I digitized everything, those CDs went into a box, where they stayed until I sold them all online earlier this year.

To be completely honest, for the bulk of the last 10 years, I haven't bought a lot of music. I was on Napster, on AudioGalaxy, and on Usenet, downloading away. Having access to that much new music changed the way I listened. When I was in college, a favorite album might get played 50-100 times, or more. These days if something is a favorite, it probably gets around 12 plays because I am constantly finding new artists and new albums to listen to. I probably listen to 10-20 new albums every month, some only once, most about 3-4 times.

It's been pointed out recently that the iPhone and other similar devices aren't necessarily a new type of phone as they are a completely new category altogether. I use it way more as a computer than I do as a phone. Now we have these computers in our pocket, with reasonably fast access to the internet from most major cities. And it's only going to get faster.

The iPod was a major gamechanger, but to me, it's the iPhone that has been revolutionary.

Enter the Cloud
I am the poster-child for the type of consumer that would benefit from a music subscription service. The only problem for me has been the fact that I'm a Mac guy. All of the music subscription services for a long time had been PC only. And that was only for when I was at my computer. There were mobile versions of some of these services available, but they were locked into special hardware or to only a certain brand, most usually a Windows phone.

A year or so ago, I caught a blog post about the relaunch of mog.com as a subscription service. There was a free trial, so decided to check it out. Over the last 12 months, I've noticed that I'm slowly phasing out my iTunes usage and phasing into Mog.

It's not perfect. There are features I wish it had: The ability to rate tracks, a warning when you're adding a duplicate to a playlist, a real OSX app with drag/drop instead of a flash based player. The iPhone version could use some work too. I would love to be able to shuffle songs there, among other things. But what it does have going for it is 320 kbps MP3 files (great audio quality) and a huge selection. I tried out a competitor, RDIO, over the summer. Nicer software, but their selection of tracks was awful. I couldn't find what I wanted to listen to.

But here's a use-case scenario that makes it worth it to me. Paste Magazine posted their top 50 albums of 2010 a few days ago. About 10 were new to me and I instantly was listening to high quality versions in seconds. A couple of them were fantastic.

The Effect on Piracy
This is highly anecdotal, but I think that the growth of services like Mog, RDIO, and the upcoming Spotify (popular in Europe, trying to get licensing here) have had an effect on piracy. I've noticed that over the last year, the amount of music posted for download on alt.binaries.music.indie (Usenet) has slowed to a trickle.·

Owning vs Renting
I would much rather spend $10 a month ($5 if you don't use Mog on a mobile device) renting my music than $150-$300 owning it. Especially given the fact that I will probably only listen to most of that stuff once.

I spent the last 10 years archiving all of the music I acquired to CDs and then DVDs. Lately, I've quit doing that because music is moving to the cloud.