Take iTunes to the Cloud

During last week's Rock and Roll event, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed the iTunes Music Store as the number one music retailer in world, with over 8.5 billion songs sold, and over a hundred million accounts set up on the store. That market success is well deserved because Apple paved the road for legitimate digital music downloading and created a synergy between iTunes, Apple's mobile devices, and Apple TV.

iTunes 9 and the iTunes Store sport a somewhat fresh design making them a little easier to navigate. The Genius and Genius Mixes are appropriately named, for they both deliver awesome playlists of music and music recommendations based on your iTunes library and the other shared iTunes libraries throughout the world. The sleek new goody bag of iTunes LP extras might also attract many iTunes users.

But I think Apple is missing a growing niche market by not taking iTunes and the iTunes Music Store to the clouds. I've written about this before, but sometimes you just gotta harp on something in the hope that enough people speak out and the powers-that-be will start listening.

Ever since I started using advertisement-free Lala.com, I have not purchased one album from the iTunes Store, and I'm not sure I plan to anytime soon. As I'm writing this article, I'm listening to on Lala.com: the recently released "The Blueprint 3" album of 15 songs by Jay-Z. I'm sampling full versions of the songs, not just 30-second excerpts that you get on iTunes.

Songs from this album costs $1.29 each on the iTunes Store, whereas on Lala.com, they're .15 cents for each web version of the song, or $1.35 for the entire web album. If I want the mp3 version, I pay $7.99 for the download on Lala, whereas the same album cost $10.99, or $16.99 for the deluxe LP version on the iTunes Music Store.

Nearly everyday I sample one or more albums on Lala.com and I budget about $10/month to purchase web-based songs on Lala for under .10 per song. That's like 5 albums for the price of one that I would pay on iTunes. I've set up an easy way to access my Lala account and playlists for web streaming, and other than occasional buffering issues, I rarely have any problems with listening to my purchased web streaming music.

With my collection of web-songs stored in the cloud, I don't have to keep purchasing hard drives to hold and backup my growing iTunes library of songs and other media (my library is about 119 gigs right now, with very few movies and television shows downloaded.) Yes, memory is cheap these days, but there's simply a more affordable way to listen to and own music and other media.

Streaming music from the iTunes Store would be a perfect fit for iPhone and iPod touch users. SimplifyMedia has already produced an application for both mobile devices that allows you to stream music from your and other's iTunes library. This feature should have been included in iTunes 9. Sure, it's practical to have songs stored on your iPhone, but there's no need to have your entire library stored on an Apple portable music player when you can get that same library streamed wirelessly to your portable device.

The social networking aspect of Lala.com also does what can't be done in the iTunes Store. When I browse Lala, I'm not limited to recommendations made by the company staff, I get to see what other members with similar music interests are listening to.

Though I haven't experienced it yet, I've read about a similar web streaming service popular in Europe called Spotify. Not sure how different or better it is than Lala.com, but it seems both services have business models for where digital entertainment should be headed. Instead of having to download large full-length movie files from the  iTunes Store, why can't you just stream it onto your computer or other devices? Netflix has gone that direction. YouTube is already there. Many people now get their news streamed to their mobile phones. This is the direction Apple needs to be going.

In a nutshell, the future of digital media should be based on "less is more". We should need fewer and fewer boxes and devices to access media. All-encompassing media centers and mobile devices should replace stand alone TVs, stereos, radios, and DVD players. Apple has all the devices to go full steam ahead in this direction. Though Internet technology still has a long way to go before full-blown web-streaming of media is a reality, the technology has come far enough for a significant niche market to colonize the space.