mSpot Brings Cloud-Based Streaming Music Service To iPhones
Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is bringing its free music cloud service that allows you sync your entire music collection across mobile phones and PCs/Macs to iPhones with the launch of a new app.
Context & Ripple Effects
mSpot's iPhone launch lands in a market that has been building toward cloud-hosted libraries for years: Melodeo outlined a music service built from iTunes playlists back in 2007, and Lala demoed an iPhone app streaming a user's library from the cloud in March 2009. More recently, MOG shipped mobile apps with unlimited downloads to the phone in March 2010, establishing the subscription-download alternative to owning files.
The timing matters because Apple quietly enabled online streaming to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches in August 2010, meaning the platform owner had already opened the door mSpot now walks through. mSpot's pitch is the locker rather than the subscription: a free sync of your entire existing collection across phones and PCs/Macs, no purchase of new catalog required.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners get a way to carry their full existing music collection without filling device storage — a direct alternative to syncing through iTunes.
- MOG's unlimited-download mobile apps and mSpot's free cloud locker are now competing head-to-head for the same iPhone listener, with different economics: subscription rental versus free sync of owned files.
Second-order effects
- Apple, which enabled streaming on its devices months earlier, faces growing demand from users to offer its own hosted-library answer before third parties own that relationship on iOS hardware.
- Carriers and device makers lose a storage-and-sync differentiation point as collections move off handsets, pushing competition toward data plans and bundled services instead.
Third-order effects
- If lockers become the default way people carry music, ownership shifts from files on a device to accounts on someone else's servers — making the phone OS owner the gatekeeper every cloud-music startup depends on.
- The split between locker services (sync what you own) and subscription services (rent the catalog) sets up the consolidation logic that decides which startups survive versus get acquired.
The trend: Personal music libraries are migrating from local device storage to cloud lockers, with each iPhone-capable entrant raising the stakes for Apple to define the category itself.