Numero Group Opts Out Of iCloud: Who'll follow?

I don't understand Rob Sevier's objection.

Does he think that small labels won't get a proper share of the revenue, or does he think people who haven't paid for his records will somehow wind up "owning" them on Apple's cloud?  Either would be a reasonable objection, but I can't tell which one it is.

Or does he think we should all have to buy two copies to have one in the cloud, which isn't a reasonable objection (or at least, not a realistic one in this day and age?)

As I understand it, I think Sevier's objection is that small labels won't get a proper share of the revenue -- which is reasonable, given that, as Numero stated in its blog post, they represent copyright holders who haven't released music in dozens and dozens of years.

I've often wondered what impact the increasing reliance on digital mediums to store our art, music, and literature will have on what is left from the 2000's onward.  Universities are converting vast stores of knowledge previously held in books to electronic formats.  Considering that we've practically lost the ability to read information located on a 3.5" floppy disk (who has a floppy drive anymore?), what happens in 100 years when the current technology can't read something created in 2010, or if there is no technology at all.

It's one of many reasons I hate the Kindle.

This is kind of backwards thinking, really. It's the physical medium that's the problem, not the digital information.  Your floppy example shows this. Yes, anything stored ONLY on a certain physical medium is bound to be unreadable at some point. That's been a problem since man drew on cave walls.

The promise of the "cloud" in this instance is that once stored, these things almost never disappear. They are now divorced from their underlying physical medium. Google / Apple / Amazon is constantly replacing the physical medium behind the scenes, ensuring that it's always available.

Also, I think the article missed what you pay Apple that $25 for. It's not to access your music, it's to store it for you.  Once you've proven to Apple that you own a piece of music, you never have to worry about where that music is again.  You can download it to any iTunes compatible device at any time. House fire wipes out your 400 disc CD collection? not really a problem any more, just get that stuff back from the cloud.  20,000 songs is about 100GB of storage, give or take. Renting that on your own will cost around $100 / year from anyone else.

You're definitely right in that the cloud makes for a fantastic back-up. That's probably how I will use mine should I choose to join it. But the thing is, even paying $25 -- which is certainly reasonable by comparison -- isn't worth it to me at this point in my life, for the reasons I wrote about in the article. If my wife's and my apartment floor bursts into flames, there's a lot of essential shit that's going along with it. That's just the way the cookie will crumble in my case.

You're totally right, Scott. That's the fantastic power of cloud computing. And if off-loads the responsibility and cost of storing and maintaining data that otherwise isn't necessary to be stored and maintained.

At the same time, though, how do future generations begin to access the sum of human knowledge, understanding and experience, 50, 100 or even 500 years from now? Today we have parts of Satyricon, Orestes, we have much of William Shakespeare's work, speeches given by Napoleon, property transfer records from the Phonecians, 78's by Hank Williams, and Anne Frank's diary. The only common thread among those items is that they exist in some sort of hard copy that can be transferred to something more usable today, and stored as a record that way.

I'm not saying that you can't lose a Hank Williams record, Anne Frank's diary or Shakespeare's greatest hits to time or the elements; but I do wonder how future generations will experience what we've learned and felt when they encounter a dust-filled, water-damaged server farm in what used to be called "Cupertino County" hundreds of years ago.

I'm a Ken Burns fan, and I've watched his Civil War series a couple of times. I am amazed at how much of that history he gleaned from letters, written letters which had been stored a century in attics. That's all we know of how people lived at that time. Those letters are the only record we have. And so I can't help but wonder whether some future version of Ken Burns will be able to comb through some digital attic for emails. I'm doubtful. The common person will have no voice with which to speak to future historians.

Technology folk will have you believe that Cupertino server farm you mention--or at least its successors--will always exist. Now that information is on the machine, they believe, it will simply be transferred from one technology to the rest. This is, of course, a fallacy. It is inevitable that one day, perhaps a decade or perhaps a dozen millennia from now, the electricity will click off, and all those magnetized 1s and 0s will evaporate. My personal belief is that every record of culture after about 1990 will evaporate with it, leaving nothing but a gaping hole. This era, ironically the height of human achievement, will look like another Dark Age.

Yes, this.  Civilizations go through cycles, with advanced civilizations often going through the most dramatic change.  There is no reason to think that the technological knowledge we have today, or that we will have 50 years from now, will be around in 500 years.  But a book of Shakespeare probably will be.

For those of you who like sci-fi, Jack McDevitt's novel Eternity Road does an excellent job of imagining this kind of future.  And bonus, there's scenes set in a very far future Chicago.

But you are focused in the letters we find, not the thousands that we don't. Of course, we can't speak to what's in the letters we don't find, but they surely exist. The same will be true into the future.

I think Blue is more focused on the fact that Burns had something physical to hold onto, to look at, to read, that didn't require any technology other than his own two eyes, and perhaps a magnifying glass. 

IF the technology that we are so reliant on remains viable, IF our energy demands are met and we still have electric to run server farms and devices, IF, in other words, we live in a Star Trek future, then preserving things digitally makes sense and will preserve vastly more information than we could using paper.  But if we don't, then we won't even be leaving fragments.  There will just be nothing.

I think that I don't know what the future holds. I have no objection (at all) to paper archives, but I am willing to bet that the species figures out how to access digital data for a long time into the future. I don't consider that so much "Star Trek" as beyond the scope of my knowledge and/or imagination.

I just read that and need to clarify. History is always made up of the records we have. Ken Burns uses what he has. Ken Burns V will use records as well. They will not be letters home (but then, today's Ken Burns doesn't use all sorts of media that had been popular), but they might be blog entries, God help us comments on web pages, emails, and other communications that are serving a similar function. 

The problem, though, is that these blog entires, these comments, the magnetic impulses I'm typing right now are very ephemeral, and they require at least some form of constant energy imput to continue and some form of complicated interface to comprehend. A book or a written letter, on the other hand, can sit around for a century or two and be okay. Someday, that constant energy imput inevitably will cease to exist. (I know you don't buy that ... and that's okay.) When that happens, we will be left with absolutely nothing. Ken Burns had access to, maybe, 0.00001% of the written correspondence of the 1860s. Ken Burns V will have access to nothing. 0%. Not a derned thing. (If I thought differently for even a half-second, I'd never use the word "derned" in a comment.)

Now, I know this is simply a mental exercise, as there are genie/bottle issues here. I'm not arguing that we give up the machines, as that's a useless argument. I'm simply making my own prediction. You and the techy people make yours. We'll all be dead by the time the issue comes up anyway, so we'll never see who's right. 

That's it, Blue. You said it.

I should watch some PBS this weekend.

Interesting point. I would say that we have undoubtedly lost vast amounts of documentation from every historical civilization before us. They wrote stuff down (we find occasional scraps), but the physical materials are mostly just  . . . gone. So, here's the dilemma. Would you rather rely on media that may become technically obsolete, but still hold their information, or media that decay to dust and disappear?

I'd gamble with the former, since we know how things work out with the latter.

I agree with you 100%. Any media on which you put something instantly becomes obsolete. I suppose my concern is that we will have created a system so reliant on magnets and electricity that it when it becomes obsolete, it's gone for good. I'm not arguing for or against any of this technology, just that it's hard for me to imagine my grandchildren logging into my iCloud, Flickr, Facebook and iTunes accounts after I'm gone and discovering a side of me they never knew, and therefore a more profound understanding of their past. I can imagine them finding a box of DVDs, CF cards, photo negative and CD's, putting them into players and rediscovering the past.

Again, not to say that can be done with a broadband connection and a thumbdrive. It's just harder for me to imagine. /oldman

No, I'm with you. Scott made a good point though. If the same companies are still around they will have been migrating data from form to form the whole time. Your grandkids might not know what Flickr is, but they very likely will have access through some other service. On the other hand, photo negatives, for instance, are sort of "extra cool" to find, since you see it before you develop it.

It's not an easy issue, that's for sure.

Yeah, that's mainly my objection -- if you could call it that -- too. I think it's going to be anti-climatic to show my kids the hard drive w/all my music on it, and just say, "have at!". I'm picturing a better time w/me saying, "this is this album, I bought it at this time, and it drove your mother nuts." Not sure I can do that with an iCloud ...

This is the album I bought. It is warped and players for it are prohibitively expensive. Oh, you already found it on line and are listening to it? Oh, uh, good.

Sadly, I suspect that's going to be how it plays out. 

You're probably right. Doesn't mean I won't try to initiate that conversation though. /futureoldman /getoffmylawn

No reason not to. All they can do is put you in a home because they think you're senile . . .

Surely, that won't be so bad at all!

Look at me, walking like a chump (the day Homer discovered the wheel chair).

I need to watch that episode again. (Hopefully, I have it on DVD).

I think, sadly, most of it will just vanish into thin air. To perhaps put it another way: What happens when the cloud goes *poof?*