Google’s announcement of its Music Beta service adds yet another opportunity to push our social and cultural lives into the cloud. The system allows you to upload your music collection, liberating your hard drive or phone memory space currently cluttered by MP3 audio files, and making your music available anywhere through multiple devices.
Google’s service is the second major entry into a likely field of three monsters. Amazon already introduced its Cloud Drive, which lets you buy music from their store, but also upload your own, all to play from the Internet. Apple has built a mysteriously massive server farm in North Carolina that will likely host some similar service (a virtual version of iTunes, perhaps).
While the opportunity to host your music on an omnipresent data network is cool and convenient, the implications for cultural consumers (and producers) is probably more compelling. Once you’ve uploaded your music, the cloud will know what you like to listen to…or, better yet, what you ACTUALLY listen to. It will also know where you are, since you’re likely carrying a geolocation device in your pocket. And it will know who your friends are, since you’ll be using GMAIL or Facebook or somesuch.
Your musical (and eventually movie) preferences, your physical location, and your social network, all interconnected and available to industries that make their living on advertising and content sales. Any institution that offers place-based cultural experiences should be drooling at the opportunity, and scrambling to plug in (you like Rufus Wainwright? He’s performing tonight down the block…You like Mahler? Your local symphony is performing his music this weekend…). Any individual who values their privacy should be considering when to opt out.
As one commenter noted in the previous link, ”If you are not paying for the service, you are the product being sold.” Which is fine if you’ve carefully considered and accepted the true cost and value of the transaction, but creepy if you’re not paying attention.
Boy, I just do not understand why it is a bad thing if the retailers or cultural organizations I use become better at tailoring their sales pitches to my tastes. Unless you’re somehow ashamed of your purchases, this can only be helpful. My problem with the Amazon and iTunes “Recommendations for You” isn’t that they know too much about me; it’s that they still aren’t very good at figuring out what I’ll like.
The main drawback, it seems to me, is that publications like Time Out and the Village Voice, dependent on listings revenues, are going to seem increasingly superfluous. (If that hasn’t already happened.)