The Digital Download Is Dead
How Google's music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever. While the iPod has come to symbolize the digital music age, it's iTunes that's allowed Apple to control the musical marketplace. iTunes has a nice interface …
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece extends a debate that has been running since at least 2007, when Forbes asked whether the iPod would kill Blockbuster — the question then being whether digital distribution would eat physical media. By 2008 the frontier had moved to quality within downloads themselves, with services like HDtracks selling CD-quality files as an upgrade over iTunes' standard store.
Slate's argument on 2010-05-21 is that the next displacement is already underway: not better downloads, but no downloads at all, as Google's newly announced music-streaming venture attacks the iTunes model where Apple's control actually lives — the marketplace between the iPod and the record labels.
First-order effects
- Google becomes a direct rival to Apple's most defensible asset: iTunes, which the piece identifies as the real instrument of Apple's control over the music business rather than the iPod itself.
- Record labels gain a second heavyweight buyer alongside iTunes for the first time in years, weakening Apple's negotiating position on pricing and terms.
Second-order effects
- Apple must respond on the service layer rather than the device layer — its hardware advantage means little if playback shifts from locally stored files to streams its gadgets don't uniquely control.
- Download-only retailers such as HDtracks are pushed into a premium audiophile niche, since a mainstream streaming option undercuts the convenience case for owning files at all.
Third-order effects
- If access replaces ownership as the default, consumer lock-in migrates from the device-plus-store bundle Apple built to whoever hosts the cloud library — turning music from a product sold once into a service billed continuously.
- That structural shift invites closer regulatory and label scrutiny of whichever company ends up controlling both the catalog and the pipe, a tension the iTunes era never had to face at this scale.
The trend: Digital music is moving from per-file ownership through storefronts like iTunes toward cloud-hosted streaming controlled by platform companies, with Google forcing the transition Apple profited from delaying.