The ultimate goal for music technology, “the celestial jukebox," is going to be reached very soon. That term has been floating around for a decade or more, but what it comes down to is total access, anywhere and at any time, to any music ever recorded. That's not just the 10 million songs presently in the iTunes sStore, but the really long tail: the forgotten archives of sound-recording history, the exploding amateur library that MySpace Music and YouTube have made possibleeverything.
The celestial jukebox won't just be a listening interface; it's clear from the past quarter-century of mix tapes and file-swapping and recommendation engines that we also want to be able to share music (without digital-rights management) and be surprised by things we've never heard before. The only question is whether we're going to get the celestial jukebox the way that the biggest copyright holders would prefer: by paying for it.
A few primitive beta versions already exist. Rhapsody lets its users stream a large but limited range of recordings for a flat monthly rate, although it doesn't stream directly to mobile devices. Meanwhile, the iTunes Store and similar online retailers allow mobile customers to buy recordings on a pay-as-you-go basis. But scouting for free music onlinein both authorized and unauthorized venuesisn't just cheaper, it offers a much broader selection.
Eric Garland of the media-monitoring company BigChampagne noted in 2007 that “100 percent of the time, somebody seeking a popular song [online] will get a free copy of that popular song." Nearly any recording can be found somewhere in MP3 form with a minimal amount of digging. The illicit BitTorrent tracker OiNK, shut down in 2007, assembled a gigantic amount of music in one placea collection so comprehensive that its users were willing to put up with its complicated, draconian rules.
And what about the old-fashioned music technology of records and CDs? Physical, fungible artifacts used to be the standard way consumers experienced music, and now they're rapidly becoming luxury items. Soon, anyone who's going to acquire music as an object will want that object to be more special than just another damn CD cluttering up the shelf. Last year, the band Of Montreal released their album Skeletal Lamping in seven different formats: CD and LP, of course, as well as tote bag, T-shirt, metal buttons, wall decals, and a paper lantern, all of which included access to a digital version of the music. It was a whimsical stunt, but the point was clear: A shiny metal disc is now exactly as relevant to the way people experience music as a paper lantern is.
Given the total availability and mind-boggling abundance of music, the listener's problem becomes navigation: How the hell do you figure out what to listen to next? That's the other part of the future-of-music puzzle. The two smartest, best-received music-technology innovations of the last couple of years were both solutions to it: Pandora and Muxtape. Pandora is effectively a celestial radio station, triangulated for each user's taste to play music you didn't already know you wanted to hear. (It also streams to some mobile devices now.) And the original version of Muxtape, which shut down last August because of legal difficulties, made it marvelously easy to assemble and distribute mixes. It didn't hurt that, like every music-technology innovation that's ever caught on, from the fretted guitar neck to the iPod, both of them featured brilliantly simple interfaces.
Before long, somebody will put a similarly beautiful, frictionless design on the service that users are demanding: a genuinely comprehensive library of recorded music; instant, mobile access to it; the limitless capacity to alter, sequence, and share it with friends and strangers; and personalized guidance to discover new music. Every piece of that technology already exists right now. The only problem is that there are nearly insurmountable obstacles to building the perfect public music library under current copyright law. But it's going to happen anyway, lawfully or otherwise.
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