Motherboard

The online music cloud descends.

In the music industry, consider this the lull before the storm. As in, I wouldn’t be making too many big plans in the music distribution game right now—unless you’re Apple, or one of the two other cloud-based music sites that Apple is poised to begin competing with, aggressively. Which is to say that somehow, in the past decade of uncertainly and redefinition within the music industry, it’s just going to get weirder.

We don’t know /exactly/ how Apple is going to shake up the game, but the safe assumption is that it will involve Lala, the music streaming/music purchase website that it bought last year and promptly shuttered. Lala was a cloud-based music site—that is, a listener played music not from an mp3 on his or her computer, but from some centralized database. Many would consider it a minor player.

Now, it has the market, marketing, and development power of Apple behind it. In this week’s New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones suggested that there is an iTunes.com in the future, a cloud replacement for our possibly short-lived world of buying, downloading, and listening to tracks on our computer or portable player. Basically, take out the middle step. The music file ceases to exist with the individual listener, and moves to some hopefully very trustworthy server somewhere.

The premise is that the devices we listen to music on now are connected to the internet anyhow, so what then is the point then of having the actual mp3? It’s hard to come up with one. It is a file name on some sort of screen and an audio output. And that can be duplicated very easily with the cloud (while maintaining the same audio quality). But even if it didn’t have the same quality, or skipped now and then, or cut off the occasional track at the end—the cloud still wins. The cloud, you see, is everything.

Everything, directed by few

Imagine: an entire world drawing from the same all-encompassing music collection. (For the vast majority of music listeners, the always-growing iTunes is all-encompassing.) In a way that brushes creepiness, the cloud represents a music listening singularity: radio, mixtapes, albums, singles, obscurities, all of it. And for that tactile ownership experience that mp3s didn’t offer anyhow, we still have records—yes, expect sales of actual vinyl records to balloon even more. For the vast majority of other listening, this is it. In a few years, expect mp3s to be as archaic as CDs, and not even around long enough to have irony value.

It’s difficult to know what all of this might mean for the currently existing music cloud. That’s basically Pandora and MOG. The latter is probably most similar to what Apple will unveil: a combination of Pandora-style algorithmic radio station—that is, a very complicated computer program makes a playlist based on your likes and dislikes—and stream-at-will listening of tracks, albums, and playlists. Probably mix in some social networking while we’re at it, a la last.fm.

So, a listener can be their own DJ, sort of be their own DJ (via the algorithm), or go for the sweet authoritarianism of the traditional radio DJ via someone else’s playlist. What’s to stop whole new sorts of “radio” stations from forming as playlists in the cloud? Like Podcasts, but track-by-track mixes, with no downloading, and with recognizable brand names. As Frere-Jones says, “In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio.”

The underground problem

There are a pair of catches with the cloud-shift that I’m having trouble working around, however. The first is the issue of the “gate,” getting into that cloud. I know iTunes is absurdly full of even the most underground stuff—and certainly more full than Lala ever was—but damned if I can find the up-to-the-minute Baltimore club cuts I get on 92Q here in Baltimore. Or the passed-around noise cd-r that’s been hanging out here on the corner of my desk. Remember, the above “radio” mixes aren’t introductions to the cloud, they come from the cloud.

Which takes me back to how I got into music, via a now-dead radio show called Brave New Waves out of Montreal. From midnight to four in the morning, I stayed awake listening to music from the most outer fringes, the stuff that exists in opposition to the cloud—and, by the way, how can the idea of the cloud not have a mainstreaming effect? How does the underground fit into the cloud? And, like mp3s, does it separate the underground more—make less soluble, less accessible—from the aboveground cultural world? What happens, then, when that cultural friction disappears? Does the underground become a sad, self-serving island? I dunno. But I know that if it does the next logical step is rot.

The point is that the cloud isn’t entirely permeable: there is a gate to it, and the idea of that makes me uneasy.

Community in the cloud?

The other thing I wonder about is community. I think there is a thing to radio that has nothing to do with listening to a song. It has to do with with doing something with other people at the same time. As very, very imperfect as it is, our 92Q here in Baltimore is a thing that brings a great many people together. It’s not exactly a peaceful or equal togetherness, but there is a shared identity there. It is a way that we can feel together with people that we may not know, but have Baltimore in common. The cloud is about individuation, on the other hand. Every listener their own station. Every listener their own city.

If it is the new radio, the thing we listen to in our cars, in our homes, in our headphones walking down the street, than it is imperfect. And they will want it to be the thing, not a thing—as it is now. Whatever Apple unleashes with its cloud, expect it to be the beginning of that demand.