We store music on iTunes despite its stringent DRM, preventing us from freely sharing music. But like any innovation in the marketplace, it takes time for us to determine what is acceptable and what is not. The promise of cloud computing and the ability to store limitless amounts of music may perhaps be that turning point.
But it could also mark a more stringent time than we have ever known.
Canonical has unveiled the public beta of its Ubuntu One music store that gives a glimpse of what cloud computing may offer as an alternative to storing music on our hard drives or a proprietary service like iTunes. This is new territory. As Canonical point out, integrating a cloud service like Ubuntu One with buying music is new for digital music stores.
Ubuntu One serves as a desktop music service that stores the music in the cloud and syncs it with your computer. It allows someone to purchase music and then store it in their Ubuntu One account. Ubuntu One also serves as a service to store other kinds of information such as images or documents.
The service will go live in late April to coincide with Ubuntu's new release. In the meantime, Canonical is looking for beta testers to give it a try. Helpful infomation is on the Popey blog:
As with everything in Ubuntu Lucid, the developers are keen to get people testing the store before Lucid is shipped at the end of April. If you're running Ubuntu Lucid either on bare metal or inside a Virtual Machine, it would help greatly if you could take some time to test this new functionality. So far only a very limited number of beta testers have been using the store, so opening up the store to public scrutiny should generate plenty of feedback to the developers.
These are the early days of music services that allows you to purchase, store music in the cloud and sync with your computer or smartphone And it comes with definite kinks. The Ubuntu One service is free for up to 2 gigabytes of storage. If you go beyond that you start to pay. That could happen pretty quickly as people can use the service to store any kind of information they want.
Plus, there are the copyright laws that have had to be taken into consideration for the service.
Music, in some respects, defines how we view the ways we store information. Music is deeply personal. We want easy access to it. We want it always to be there. Cloud services may provide this capability but they also run the risk of acting as walled gardens that can be controlled perhaps even more easily than a service like iTunes.
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