I have been using a new feature of the Funambol OneMediaHub solution, which is storing music in a personal cloud for playback across mobile devices and computers. Once your music is in your personal cloud, it is automatically and wirelessly synced across your devices, such as phones, tablets and computers that are linked to your cloud. It is sort of like iTunes and the cloud except that it is your own cloud, it works with all of your brands of devices, and you don't need to buy music from any one source.
As music can be instrumental (sorry for the pun) to people's digital lives, like other digital content such as photos, videos, documents, contacts and calendars, it makes sense that music should also be in your cloud. The only functionality that is not provided for music, that is available for other digital content such as pictures and videos, is sharing, as sharing music is still a potential recipe for legal wrangling.
The inclusion of music in a personal cloud does raise several questions, however.
What about digital rights managed (DRM) and other protected forms of music? Much has already been written about storing music in the cloud. The simple answer for OneMediaHub is that it basically allows people to work with music that they have legitimately obtained and is DRM-free. People cannot use a OneMediaHub-based personal cloud service for illegal music sharing for at least three reasons. First, sharing of music is unsupported. Second, the terms of service prohibits this. Third, when the service is deployed by mobile service providers, many of whom are large mobile operators around the world, they use safeguards to prevent this. In addition, the trend in online music is to move away from DRM, by charging people more upfront for music, so chances are that people's music is becoming non-DRM.
For people that just want an easy way to keep their legal music stored and backed up in their own cloud, and to have it easily accessible on any of their devices or via the web without manual effort, OneMediaHub is a killer app. For example, you can just drag-and-drop DRM-free music into a folder on your PC or Mac and voila, it is in your personal cloud and available on your devices. No muss, no fuss, with a nice mobile app and web interface that makes it fun to listen to single tracks as well as playlists and shuffled music. There is no extra fee or hassle for keeping your music in your own personal cloud.
Another question is why would anyone want their music in the cloud when streaming is rapidly gaining popularity as more people stream music, movies or TV shows versus purchasing or downloading them? The short answer is that streaming music is great for many situations, especially when people are casually listening to music. But there are other times when streaming music is not ideal. When? Maybe you do not have connectivity at a particular time or place, or there is a cost or cap to your internet or mobile bandwidth that you don't want to incur. Why stream the same song over and over when you can sync it once and play it locally on your phone, tablet or computer, without worrying about buffering?
There is also a question of quality. Some streamed music is reduced in quality whereas with your own music, you can keep the music quality as high fidelity as you want.
There is also a matter of privacy. When you stream music, it may provide interesting ways to manage the music you like and expose you to other music that may be of interest. But at the same time, many people might prefer to not have a third party involved with their music. For the same reason that many people do not want to post all of their personal photos or videos on a social network, because these could be mined for advertising, the same potential exists for music streaming. Music streaming providers or their advertisers might try to infer certain things about you so they can target you better with ads. But at the end of the day, when all you want to do is listen to music, who wants to be bothered that Big Brother is listening in on your listening habits? For younger people who are casually listening to music, streaming is great, but others may prefer to own their music and listen without Big Brother.
The bottom line 'case' for storing and syncing music in your own personal cloud is that it's simple, it doesn't require that you buy music from any source, and nobody is keeping track of your tracks. That alone may be music to people's ears.
The new music capability of OneMediaHub will be available by our mobile provider customers and on onemediahub.com in the months to come. Dare I say, stay 'tuned', it's pretty awesome :)
