I have been an active digital music user since 1997. I have collected literally thousands of music files through the years. During this time I have experienced some good things and some bad things.

One of the good things I experienced was the original Napster. It allowed me to search for music and download it from other users in a free format. We all know the perils of such an “evil” endeavor. Low cost music is almost as evil as mass murder. I must admit that I bought far more CD’s back then than I do now. Napster allowed me to test drive new music without the fear of being stuck with a bad CD. How many one good song CD’s do you own? I own several hundred. I tried to be responsible netizen and purchase CD’s of the music I really liked. I understand that nobody works for free. Another feature that I loved was the ability to listen to rare music, live music and bootlegs. Some of my favorite mp3’s are cover songs from other artists or different versions than the standard radio format. I have several really cool arrangements from the Howard Stern Show like live acoustic music from Foo Fighters, or AC/DC doing hit songs in a very simple acoustic guitar arrangement. I also have bootlegs from Dylan or the Barenaked Ladies doing cover songs from their live shows. These are songs that never ever get released but are cool to listen to.

The bad part of digital music is the inevitable hardware failure. I have several hard drives that I can no longer boot but I am hoping to find a method in which to recover my covers, bootlegs and other unique recordings. Recently I slipped on some ice and cracked my ipod screen while it still plays it got me thinking about what I would lose if it broke. I have tried to keep it backed up on different computers but as my collection grows it gets harder to keep track of it. Music purchased online needs to be authorized every time you move it. It is a royal pain in the butt. It took me months to digitize thousands of the CD’s I own. It makes me revert to burning CD’s and DVD’s of music so that I don’t again lose thousands of songs.

The other bad part is Digital Rights Management. Content owners are increasingly becoming more aggressive with their products. We all saw the backlash to Sony Music’s Spyware. I Tunes makes you reauthorize your music purchases which can be a time killer. I find it funny that coders spend time to find new ways to protect and crackers find methods to undo the security at an even faster rate. Does this mean that I am buying the content or merely leasing or renting it? Recently Mark Cuban gave the advice to crack all the copy-protected content you own and make backup copies incase of failures. This is an interesting perspective coming from a content owner and producer. His point was that the formats will change back and forth and ownership will have more complications than current systems as the owners try to protect their digital content. It seems like we are renters vs owners of media in the digital age.

I think that soon we will see companies offering disk space much like we see web space offered. Digital files will be stored and backed up at large data warehouses. End users will simply pay a monthly fee for storage much like we see today in the web host environment.Instead of a MyDocuments Folder on your local drive it will be a web space that you log into and access your photos, documents, files, videos and music.