Whatever happened to online music lockers?
The free version of GMail now offers nearly 5GB of data storage, as much as my $150 iPod.
Meanwhile, Apple is selling more and more unrestricted music in the AAC format. These songs are not tied to a particular computer, unlike the songs that used to be sold through Apple's music store. And Apple recently cut prices, making unrestricted songs as cheap as restricted songs.
So why hasn't someone built a website where I can upload all of my music files and listen to them from any computer? At work, on my wife's laptop, in a hotel, etc.
The infrastructure is cheap. In fact, it's so cheap, I'd gladly foot the storage bill myself. Amazon now charges just 15 cents per month to keep 1 GB of data on its Web servers. Add in the cost to upload that data, and you're talking about $15 for the first year to dump the contents of my iPod onto the Web (falling to half that for subsequent years, since the music is already uploaded).
A smart company could probably offer the service for free and make money interspersing audio ads with your music. Or make online storage of unrestricted music files a premium upgrade to an existing product.
Bear in mind that I'm talking about music storage, not music sharing. Aggressive interpretation of copyright law is what doomed the original MP3 locker, my.mp3.com, seven years ago.
I reserved tunesr.com for just such a service, but amid my other projects have not made much progress on it.
2 comments:
There is, http://www.lala.com/
It'll scan your iTunes list and recreate it online. It has a good selection of songs already in its library, and if you have a song it doesn't already know, it'll upload it. Allows you to create playlists and log in from anywhere.
Enjoy
Hi Ryan
I've been looking for exactly the same thing - and think I might have found it: MP3tunes.com
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