DIMINISHING RETURNS
In the spirit of my post a few days ago, I've been trying to get my music organized online in recent days.
While ripping some new CDs into iTunes the other day, a tedious chore at any time, a recurring thought came to me...wouldn't it be great to have all the world's published music on an iPod?
How much storage would that take?
A quick Google search brought up this great post by ZDNet's Robin Harris, who asked himself the same question a few days ago in a post titled "The Paradise of Infinite Music":
"Infinity is bigger than you think, padawan
How much music has been recorded by humanity? No one knows for sure, but here’s an approximation: a lot!The iTunes music store reports they have over 6,000,000 songs, not including the Beatles. But let’s start there.
Coming in 2017 - the 24 terabyte iPod!
The largest current iPod is 160 gigabytes. According to Apple’s bonded and insured marketing it will hold “up to” 40,000 songs, presumably at Apple’s anemic 128 KB AAC encoding, or 4 MB per song. That equals 24,000,000,000,000 - 24 TB - of storage, today."
Yowza! All the personal storage I own today in the form of various hard drives, USB sticks, Solid State Drives AND all my iPods don't add up to a quarter of that. Maybe they will by 2017.
But then I thought about the question from another angle.
What good is it having all the world's music, or even just iTunes' 6 million tracks, if one doesn't have the time to listen to them?
At 3 minutes a track, 6 million tracks add up to 34 years of listening, without any coffee-breaks.
I don't know about you, but it takes me a little while just finding the tracks I want to listen to; assume it takes a minute to find the track one wants. So that's over 11 years of SEARCHING for the music one wants JUST in the iTunes library...today.
Which all comes down the obvious...in a world of practically infinite choices in music, the biggest problem will be finding the time to listen to the music you want.
The second biggest problem will be finding the music you want.
Technology can't do much about the first problem, but the second problem sure looks like an opportunity for existing and future search engines, aggregation sites, and distributed social network services.
And one doesn't live just on music alone of course.
We haven't even started discussing how much storage and time it'd take to view all recorded TV shows, movies, and other recorded material.
Oyvay! I think I'll just go read a book.
"What good is it having all the world's music, or even just iTunes' 6 million tracks, if one doesn't have the time to listen to them?"
That depends on on why you want the music. One could own a library, indeed one uses a library, without any expectation that you would read all the books. You own a dictionary or encyclopedia with the same expectation.
Thus I would suggest that owning all music in a portable device is like owning a dictionary or a library. It guarantees a very wide source of all likely information, is a standard product that all people can use, etc.
From your perspective, a universal music device might be bought for a reasonable sum, saving you all the time to create a small subset of the total music space. That might be worth something, yes?
Posted by: alex tolley | Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 07:46 PM