TheLadders.com Developer Blog

I know people have gushed over the iPhone’s musical abilities – Cover Flow browsing in particular– but the iPod/iTunes model, in general, is broken. Why? There are quite a few reasons, but there are two that stand out.

1. "Owning" music is a burdensome task for the consumer. You have to buy songs -- a financial burden -- and you have to maintain a music library -- a time burden -- on your hard drive. The activity required to maintain such a library is a distraction from the activity of actually listening to music. It doesn't seem like a big cost, but it's non-trivial compared to a zero-maintenance subscription service like Rhapsody. If you factor in having to backup and possibly having to upgrade your hard drive to store thousands of MP3/WMA/AAC files, it starts to add up. If you've ever tried to listen to DRM'ed files on a different device than they were purchased for, you've seen how consumer-unfriendly the current way of doing things is.

I think in a few years we'll regard maintaining physical music libraries in much the same way many now regard maintaining an analog photo library. For the photographer, all of the work associated -- paying to develop the photos (in both time and money), creating and storing physical photo albums, etc. -- detracts from the basic joys of taking and sharing photos.

Additionally, any personal music library will always be trivially small in comparison with the library of available recorded music that a network service can provide. An 8GB iPhone holds about 2,000 songs. Rhapsody, for example, has 3.5 million songs.

Furthermore, in the current model, a computer is always required to be an intermediary between the user's library and the iPod. Every time a change to the library is made, it must be synchronized to the device. You can't even purchase music from the Wifi-enabled iPhone directly - a computer must be involved.

2. The iPod/iTunes model allows for a very limited amount of music discovery and social interaction.

The iTunes model ignores the primacy of discovery in music listening. If the cost of listening to new music is too high, people will do it far more rarely than they would like. And when you're not listening to new music and you're just restricted to your existing library, it feels stagnant. Where is last.fm and Pandora on the iPhone? I've discovered more new music I enjoy in a short time using those services than in years of slowly building and maintaining an MP3 library.

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So, what will the iPod of the future be? I'll talk about that on Friday.