From vinyl to cassette to compact disc to mp3; the music industry is home to one of the most shape-shifting of delivery models in recent business history.  Music is a constantly evolving medium and has seen tremendous breakthroughs in the past two decades alone.  This transmutation of music embodiments has created a completely new landscape for artists and listeners to distribute/consume music.  Napster revealed just how disruptive this transformation had become, much to the dismay of many artists and record labels.  Perhaps the music industry wasn’t ready for such an open and “free” music platform.

It has been almost a decade since we witnessed the shutdown of this music phenomenon.  And while there have been many newcomers onto the music scene since that time, none have captured the attention of the masses quite like Spotify has.  Proclaimed by some as  “the Napster of today,”  Spotify’s philosophy is: instant, simple, and free.  I couldn’t think of 3 better words to describe an ideal music consumption service.  The Swedish startup has gained massive financial backing valuing the company at an estimated $250MM.  This massive figure is due in large part to the partnerships Spotify has secured with many major record labels, allowing the company to legally offer instant access to millions of tracks.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s not available in the US yet?  I have yet to experience Spotify myself and still I find it hard not to get excited for this service to hit the States.  Just as we witnessed tracks on a CD morph into files on a PC, we are now seeing the music’s next transformation: instant, on-demand music served up in the “cloud”.

Why is this significant?

I have always associated the progression of music (distribution) with Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection.    We don’t use cassette tapes now for a reason.  Cassettes simply could not survive in an environment shared with CD’s.   In enough time, the same will be said about our beloved mp3 players.

Storing music files locally and uploading them to an mp3 player will be crushed by streaming music on connected devices.  Why limit yourself to a hard drive of songs when you can have access to millions of tracks with no hard drive limitations?  This sort of evolutionary thinking is what has propelled Spotify into the limelight.  Below is a demonstration as to what’s to come in terms of music consumption:

It will be interesting to see how Apple responds with a Spotify competitor in iTunes, especially since they recently approved the Spotify iPhone App.

Is Spotify an “iTunes Killer”?  That isn’t clear just yet, but one thing is certain…they are music’s natural selection.

image via spotify vimeo channel

Microsoft recently announced the development of their cloud-based platform, Azure, which makes me ask the question: “When will all of our computing tasks be shifted over to the cloud?”

Microsoft faces stiff competition in the “race to the clouds,” mainly from Google.  Google has been a true pioneer with Google Docs, a completely free online application suite.

In order to keep up with cloud computing, Microsoft has announced that their flagship Office Suite will now be offered as a browser-based software package on the Azure platform.  Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote will now be accessible through the Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari browsers.  No word yet on the pricing model.

The race to the clouds is a huge next step for the software industry.  We will see a huge push for cloud-based computing in the next year or two.  It all depends on who strikes first and offers the right infrastructure.