Don’t forget decision cost.

It is cheaper to buy a 400 HD-DVD collection of all the music (apart from 78rpm re-releases and Britney spears CDs with slightly different album cover graphics) ever released than to faff about amassing it oneself.

We’re going to see the cross-over in value-for-money from relatively painstaking P2P amassing to buying a $500 (everything ever released ever) ready made music collection.

The remaining issue is WHAT to listen to.

It is not ensuring you have ENOUGH to listen to, but knowing that you are not deficient in terms of selection.

Once we all have all music, we know that it is our time that then becomes the precious commodity.

There are only so many listening hours in a lifetime. We will then use programs to analyse our tastes and tell us who else we should audition. We will also know who our favorite artists are, and we will beat a path to their door saying “I have twenty bucks here for your next album – when you release it – I don’t need to hear it first, I KNOW you will come up with the goods”.

Let’s assume a website is created that will randomly stream a track from any of all the CDs ever released. I doubt many people would listen to it more than any radio station. Indeed, probably less than a genre restricted radio station.

Step 1: Have on tap all music ever released
Step 2: Determine what to listen to

Let’s assume in a couple of years (with the advent of international
total-music-bootlegs) that everyone pops down to their local spiv and with a halo above their head buys the complete works of 17th-21st century musicians on a 500 HD-DVD bargain pack.

We’ll presumably see copyright change from infringement of monopoly, to criminal unauthorised duplication, to criminal possession of unauthorised copies, to Grand Theft IP with death sentence.

Anyway, yes, this isn’t fairyland I’m talking about here. This is the very near future.

Very soon it’ll not be case of getting music for nothing, it’ll be case of getting personalised playlists for nothing.

Is there going to be IP in a playlist? That’s what I want to know.

Say, everyone has all music, indexed to the track level by CD catalogue number, etc.

So, someone says, “Hey, if you’re feeling like winding down after a hard day’s sunbathing on the beach in the Bahamas, this playlist will do you just fine” and provides 4 hours of appropriate chillout. Is that playlist illegal? Will it be made a criminal offense to suggest a play order instead of actually providing the legally obtained music content itself? Presumably, you’d have to buy each CD on which each track occurred, and give those CDs
to the recipient and then you’d be permitted to indicate the play order.

Doing otherwise would be tantamount to inducing the recipient to source the music via illegitimate means.

(Slightly edited from its originally posting Dec04 on http://www.pholist.org ).