I copied around 250 albums from a friend of mine some weeks ago. I just hooked up his USB-harddrive and copied the data to my laptop. During the latest months I have been thinking a lot about how increased storage capacity will change the landscape for private copying in the coming years.
Everyone knows about Moores Law, but have you heard of Kryders Law? Scientific American interviewed Mark Kryder in 2005, an important person in the development of harddrive technology. He said: “Who would have predicted the success of hand-held digital audio players? We completely missed seeing the iPod coming. Today the density of information we can get on a hard drive is much more important to enabling new applications than advances in semiconductors.”
So, here it comes, a forecast of increased storage capacity on regular harddrives. The calculation is based on average capacity of regular consumer harddrives released during the latest ten years and extrapolated for the coming years.
1998: 8 GB
1999: 15 GB
2000: 30 GB
2001: 55 GB
2002: 100 GB
2003: 175 GB
2004: 250 GB
2005: 450 GB
2006: 600 GB
2007: 900 GB
2008: 1,5 TB
2009: 2,5 TB
2010: 4,5 TB
2011: 7 TB
2012: 12 TB
2013: 20 TB
2014: 35 TB
2015: 60 TB
2016: 100 TB
2017: 175 TB
2018: 320 TB
An average music file is around 5-6 megabytes today. If you buy a new harddrive during 2008 you can probably store around 200 000 music files on that drive. The increase in storage capacity is exponential meaning that in just 5 years a harddrive can store 4 million songs and in the year 2018 the capacity will be around 64 million songs.
DAP’s (Digital Audio Players) has the same growth in capacity, but have 20-25% less space in total. In the year 2018 a regular iPod will most likely be able to store around 6-7 million songs, and just a couple of years after that a DAP might hold most of the music that has ever been published.
The Celestial Jukebox in our hands.
I believe this is a “wild card” that most people in the music industry is not seeing at all. How will this developmnent affect private copying? When music fans can say: “I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want to copy?” What kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?
Well, ten years from now we will see.
P.S
I am currently writing an academic paper on this issue with the working name: “Effects on the Music Industry as a Result of Radically Increased Storage Capacity”.
7 Comments
1 monki wrote:
So true!
Storage capacity + wireless transfers will render the file-sharing debate as we know it today useless. The only thing you can even imagine protecting by any measures is maybe the last week of music output. An interesting parallel with the film industry whose business model is based on getting maximum revenues the first 24h a movie comes out.
All the more important of course will be the question what to do with all this abundance of recorded music!
Let me know when that paper is finished!
2 Eric Wahlforss wrote:
Nice post.
However, long before we have “unlimited” storage in our hands we’ll have ubiquitous access to cloud services with all the music in the world anyway, which also means we won’t have to worry about copying over the latest stuff. I’ve written a bit about this on my blog lately. Here’s one: http://eric.wahlforss.com/2008/03/03/please-let-me-not-own-my-music-on-spotify-soundcloud/
3 Miguel Caetano wrote:
I don’t agree with Eric. Owning music will be for me much more important than accessing music because access can be cut, blocked, filtered, banned, etc. Imagine that your ISP launches an high quality streaming service where you can only have access to the tracks that they think you “should” like. Unfortunately, the ubiquituous access utopia is just that. It will never work out. We can’t never trust too much on centralized servers. That’s why P2P is going to live forever in some form or another.
4 nininditya wrote:
an insight on how i should give an edge to my thesis! im planning to write a thesis with similar theme. goodluck with your paper!
5 Bas wrote:
I do agree with Eric.
Ownership will not be that important in the not so distant future. Here’s why…
Very soon, most of us will have mobile devices with very fast wireless internet 24 hours per day. We can then stream whatever music we want, legally or illegally. ‘Owning’ will not be that important, because if your internet is fast enough, you don’t have to ‘download’, so instead of using bittorrent for transferring a file from one to another computer, a new technology could be developed to share it like a stream (instead of cutting it up in packages).
When this happens, surely consumer rights organisations, politicians and musicians will push for collective licensing / music flat fee. Media futurist, Gerd Leonhard, already predicts this and he is not alone.
When the flat fee happens, we don’t need to store music on our own HDs.
I think storing music will be important for the next few years, until the industry sees they have lost the battle with their business models and decide to reform (and make more money again).
I’m currently writing my thesis about the future of music distribution, so I’m quite educated on this topic.
6 debcha wrote:
Wireless spectrum is a shared, limited resource. In contrast, storage (as pointed out here) is unlimited and is only used by one person. So it’s hard to imagine that streaming will ever entirely supplant downloading (and that’s leaving aside Miguel Caetano’s point about not trusting the music companies).
However, it seems most likely that the average consumer will continue to use a hybrid model - downloading some music but streaming the rest.
More on this topic, and a discussion of streaming vs downloading, can be found here.
7 Bas wrote:
Ever? Seriously?
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