There was an interesting piece in PC World yesterday about an iPhone app called Cloud Music that allows you to store your music in Google Docs and stream it through your iPhone. Google Docs now allows users to store files of all types, so this app takes advantage of that fact. I’ve yet to play with it, but its an interesting response to the restrictions the Digital Rights Management puts on our music. Since users can share things in Google Docs, presumably they can also share the music in their digital collection, provided it is not protected by DRM measures they are not able to break.

A day before that the American Public Radio program Marketplace had an interesting segment on cloud computing and streaming music, but from a totally different angle. This time it is not the users that uploads and access their own files, but rather rather the users subscribe to a huge digital library of music and stream what they want. Most of these services also offer the opportunity for downloads for users who want to be able to take their music offline. The best known examples of this are Rhapsody.com and Lala.com, recently purchased and shut down by Apple. For a monthly fee you can listen to whatever you wan in the order you want. In essence it is a vast online digital library.

I use Rhapsody and I like it a great deal because, at least to come degree, it allows the experience of listening to music to be communal again. I can create a play list, not unlike a mix tape, and send it to my friends. I can put on the music of whoever my friends have just told me I should be listening to, and I can easily change the mood of a dinner party. Here, for example, is a post in which I shared several Rhapsody play lists.

The idea is not new. In fact, similar, though less technically sophisticated, services existed back when people first began thinking people started thinking about the internet being a place folks would go for music. But they were resisted by the recording industry. I can’t recall the names of many of them, as they no longer exist. I got my first MP3 player in the second half of the 90s when EMusic, a pioneer in online music distribution was giving them away to attract subscribers. As I recall, for a monthly fee they allowed you to listen all you wanted to music while at their site, and sold downloads for offline listening. They’ve experimented with a number of streaming/downloading arrangements in their history, some of which have been more generous than others, but all of which have been a good deal for music lovers seeking access to lots of music. They have also managed to stay in business. In a service not unlike streaming one’s own collection from Google Docs, MP3.com once offered “Beam-It” a service that allowed users to access their CDs online providing they proved ownership by inserting the physical CD into their computer. It was shut down some time around 2000 under pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America.

And, of course, internet radio has been around for a couple decades too. Sites like Pandora and Last.fm upped the ante by implementing technology that allowed users to customize their stations considerably by indicating what they like and dislike. But those sites are free and do not give users the very specific level of control that the subscription library does.
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The recording industry has tried to hard to lock digital music down via DRM, ideally one download to one device, an effort that was doomed to failure, and also one which is, in spite of industry protestations to the contrary, much stricter than they ever had with analog recording. With analog recordings, be they tapes, vinyl or CD (technically digital, but you get the point), the owner of the physical recording could loan that recording out to as many people as he wanted who might, in turn, copy it onto a cassette. He could also resell it, in both cases no one associated with the original recording earned anything from the transaction. CDs, tapes and records could be resold repeatedly, and they could also be lent at libraries. To lend an album that has been downloaded requires at least one extra step, and it has no resale value as no one is going to buy a CD of downloaded music.

I would love to see the Rhapsody model applied to what is now the printed page. I have an iPad and I love reading on it. I’ve used various other e-readers and I like those, too. I’ve discovered I miss the feel of print-the actual book or magazine-less than I thought I would. I particularly enjoy magazines on my iPad. I use Zinio and Relay to download magazines, and I’ve rediscovered the joy of them. There’s something about the design and concise nature of the package that is a good magazine that appeals to me. Moreover, when they are delivered digitally they are all with me whenever my device is. The best of them look exactly like the print versions, but have extra features. Extra text, images or video that appears if you click on it.

I find it profoundly unsatisfying that I cannot share my magazines, however. We are charged the same for an ebook as a book in print, but the book in print can be lent over and over, whereas the ebook cannot be. In many cases the DRM in place prevents me from even copying a paragraph or two of text! With magazines it is even worse. To give a magazine to someone to read an article, I have to give them my iPad. Printing is sometimes and option, but different protections are in place for that as well. Sometimes you can only print one page at a time, or only a certain number of pages. What we need are Rhapsody like services for books and magazines.

We have them for most other media, so why not? Academic and a handful of community libraries already have services of this nature that they subscribe to, it just needs to be extended to the general public. Questia is a digital library open the general public on a subscription, but it focuses on students, whereas I am thinking of something for the general reader, that would carry both classical literary works and bodice ripper romance novels; magazines like Foreign Policy and The Atlantic as well as US Weekly and Sports Illustrated.

I’d subscribe.