Ballroom Dancing

Photo by Gary Miller

The Cloud vs. the Paradise of Infinite Storage

What's the bigger danger for recording artists: computer users with hard drives crammed with music or Internet file swapping? As Wednesday's music panel the Cloud vs. the Paradise of Infinite Storage proved, they actually go hand in hand. A 1-terabyte hard drive costs $70 or, as moderator Mike McGuire of media industry consultancy Gartner explained, "$120 if you like it in a nice metal case." That means that it only costs around $1,500 to buy enough memory to store the entire history of recorded music. Add in that there's no central registry for online music exchanges and that leaves the labels – which former Blue Oyster Cult producer and current visiting scholar at McGill University Sandy Pearlman called "the intellectual property overlords" – looking irrelevant as fans become distributors. Grim times indeed for the musician stuck in the money-losing middle. Intel's Peter Biddle suggested one ray of hope is to make "affinity-based relationships" with fans, giving the loyal listener a little extra to ensure they stay financially loyal. He also pointed to the best early adopters of any pay distribution model. "If the porn industry can't find a way to make it work," he noted, "it's crappy technology."