HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH

The ultimate goal for music technology, "the celestial jukebox," is going to be reached very soon. That term has been floating around for a decade or more, but what it comes down to is total access, anywhere and at any time, to any music ever recorded. That's not just the 10 million songs presently in the iTunes sStore, but the really long tail: the forgotten archives of sound-recording history, the exploding amateur library that MySpace Music and YouTube have made possible--everything. The celestial jukebox won't just be a listening interface; it's clear from the past quarter-century of mix tapes and file-swapping and recommendation engines that we also want to be able to share music (without digital-rights management) and be surprised by things we've never heard before. The only question is whether we're going to get the celestial jukebox the way that the biggest copyright holders would prefer: by paying for it...--Douglas Wolk in Portfolio