ThisJustin

Earlier this year, I was hooked on Lala, then Apple bought it, shut it down and forgot to make iTunes kick as much ass as it did. So I was left wandering through the murky waters of online music streaming services. (why didn’t I go back to iTunes? Mainly because it refuses to play nice with me using it on multiple computers and accessing one library stored on an external hard drive, it’s really slow / a memory hog / it’s installer constantly has errors (probably a personal issue but reason enough to dump it anyway))

And then I found Grooveshark. Wonderful, wonderful Grooveshark. It’s beautiful. It’s free. It’s 5 million songs plus whatever you want to upload to augment that. It’s streaming. It’s a desktop player (if you pay for VIP). It’s on mobile (if you jailbreak your iPhone and you’re VIP).  It’s everything iTunes should be.

A key user insight that Grooveshark (and other streamers no doubt) were smart enough to see or lucky enough to stumble upon is that I don’t care about owning music. I care about listening to music. The key thing to realize is that in the recent past those two things were essentially one and the same. Before streaming you had to somehow own the music (be it vinyl, cassette, CD or digital) before you could listen to it (obviously radio is an exception here but you couldn’t choose what you wanted to hear.)

This is the classic case of companies looking at what users want and interpreting it as better versions of things that exist. Sometimes, what users want is actually something that they can’t conceive of because it doesn’t exist yet. That’s when you know you have a game changing opportunity on your hands. It’s also when you know you’re actually listening to your users.

A great example of this story (which may or may not be accurate but illustrates the point very well) is the invention of the VCR.

In the 70′s the Beverly Hillbillies was one of the most popular shows in the US, especially in the South. The show aired on Wednesday nights which also happened to be church night in the bible-belt South. This meant that there were a lot of people who wanted to watch the Beverly Hillbillies but couldn’t because it was church night. The solution using existing means would have been to move the show to a different night. However, when one particularly smart researcher heard about this, they saw a different solution. Why don’t we give the consumers a device that could record the show for later viewing. This device didn’t actually exist yet but soon thereafter the Beta and eventually VHS VCRs came into existence.

Not a single consumer asked for a VCR. That wasn’t even an option they were aware of. They asked to be able to watch their favorite show. It took the smart work of some researchers to not just take the consumer wants at face value but to actually expand them into real wants and needs and then create a solution that fit knowing the advances being made in technology.

I see services like Grooveshark in the same boat. I never cared about owning music. Sure, maybe I wanted album art or some other bonus item but what I really wanted was to be able to listen to my music on my terms. That means in the car, at the gym, in the office, at home and anywhere else I am. In the traditional model that meant owning the music. Today it means having access to that music. There’s a big and important difference there and I think you’ll see many similar disruptions come to pass in the near future (just as many have already happened.) Which one do you think will happen next?

You may have read that Apple bought cloud music streaming service Lala. Well, in my little Justinverse the opposite happened, Lala took over iTunes.

I’ve been using Lala for a couple years now. Originally I just wanted an easy way to stream my iTunes library at work. Now I simply want a piece of music management software that works.

I have a lot of music. Just over 15,000 songs clocking in at around 80 GBs to be exact. Moving that kind of library around from old computer to new computer or even just to a new hard drive on the same computer is a serious pain in the ass through iTunes. I’ve tried using their preferred way of doing it and I’ve tried moving everything through Windows and then pointing iTunes back to the library and I’ve even tried storing it on an external drive to keep my laptop’s hard drive freed up. Every time iTunes can’t find songs or can’t find my library at all in the case of my laptop (despite my mapping of the drive to always show up as the same “letter.”)

While I can’t give up on iTunes for syncing my iPhone / iPod, I have given up on it for doing what it was originally supposed to do: play my goddamn music.

I’ve found a better solution through Lala. I’ve synced up all my purchases and uploaded any songs they didn’t have so now my whole collection resides in the cloud (a long process, but once it’s done, it’s done.) I can play it from any computer with an internet connection (if I could stream it from my phone it’d be perfect!)

So now that Apple has bought Lala I’m left wondering what the future of Lala’s service looks like. Reports seem to indicate that Apple wants access to Lala’s brilliant engineers more than their service. Here’s to hoping that the core service sticks around for a while, at least until Apple can play catch up in the very category it created.