The emergence of digital music hasn’t provided the full musical freedom we might have anticipated.
You buy a song on iTunes to put on your iPod, but it may be digitally-rights-managed and your ability to transfer it may prove difficult. Even when it’s your music.
Perhaps that’s why a new report by the NPD Group claims that more than 1/4 of Apple iTunes users have a strong interest in some sort of cloud computing music option, and some would be willing to pay a subscription fee to access their own music libraries on mutiple devices.
Even if iTunes starts with a free cloud-based service that allows people remote access to their personal iTunes libraries, this could open up the doors to future upgrades as the benefits of cloud-based music continue to evolve. In fact, some report that the market opportunity of a subscription-based service access to iTunes’ full music catalog could bring in nearly the same amount of revenue as the current pay-per-download model.
Having recently bought out the online music store, LaLa, speculators wonder if that’s exactly what Apple’s reason is for making a move toward the cloud.