The direction of digital music

For a long time now, digital music has been following a steady but sure path of making its turns into all of our lives. From the early days of Napster right up to the legal music stores of today, digital music has been allowing us to manage our media and sometimes extensive CD collections.

In 1997, my 3-CD Changer for my stereo was usable, until I realised that my CD collection had increased to 4 CDs. Furthermore, I wanted to make mix cds - audio extracting and writing cds are now processes which are no more challenging than making a simple dinner. That was also around the time that winamp first appeared on desktop computers and made a substantial impact to the way we listened to our music.

Once again, however, my music collection started to grow and I was forced to manage my music with playlists which I had to build myself. The progression then followed with the introduction of smart playlists, allowing for the creation of dynamically created playlists based on a certain set of criteria.

Personally, I think was the point that digital music stopped being just something we listen to. With well over 300 unique albums in my collection (and this is tiny compared to others), I am finding a challenge in organising my media in a method which is effective for searching through effectively and playing the files I want to hear. At this point, music has become an asset, a piece of information which with the correct management, can tell us a lot about ourselves. More and more are we seeing applications and internet services which facilitate extracting information from our listening habits, such as Audioscrobbler/Last.fm and musicmobs.

Not only is this pertinent to music, but we are finding that such expanses of data require a different method of handling. Whilst the notion of tagging files is not new, it is being used much more commonly. The new audioscrobbler service allows tagging of albums, artists and tracks to allow for more precise and effective locating of desired media. Stream audio based on recommendations based on listening habits or arbitrary tags. These sorts of functions are available everywhere: Flickr for for images and GMail with emails. Also powerful is the notion of being able to tag files based on other peoples suggestions - a collaborative effort to make a big task smaller.

Perhaps we are going to see more of these services pop around soon, I think so. The question is, when does convenience, information and statistics cross the line with personal data and information?