"...the selling and downloading of song files is a vestigial consumer behavior leftover from the physical media era. Consumers are still transitioning out of the idea of 'owning' their music, and downloads happened to be that natural and convenient next step in the 'digital' age. But the clouds are forming, and the storm is bound to rain (apologies for the blatant metaphor). Between Youtube, blogs and Spotify, you can already find just about any song you could possibly want to hear. Anecdotally I hear more and more kids who can’t be bothered to download anymore - the gratification is so much more instant on YouTube. Increasingly, the main value of buying or pirating an MP3 these days is that it’s a mode of cataloguing a personal music library (and sloppy one at that). Even this distinction is eroding under the increasing maturation of cloud music."

People have been saying this for years and it hasn’t happened and I still don’t see it happening anytime soon. I think this type of analysis is flawed on multiple levels, but in particular in how it looks at consumers as a whole.

Looking at the industry post-2000, the way I see it is people tend to fall into one of two buckets as music ‘downloaders’: (1) people who tend to discover and consume music passively (i.e. hear a song on the radio, download the single for repeat enjoyment), and (2) people who actively discover and consume music (i.e. discover a new artist, download their album to hear more).

Regarding bucket (1), I’d say the post is pretty spot-on. These consumers, who I’d easily say make up the majority in the market, are switching towards platforms that deemphasize ownership, and thus render ‘sales’ from iTunes and the like obsolete. But these people never really wanted to ‘own’ the content in the first place; I agree with the post that, for them, ownership was just the more natural and convenient option to consumption.

But for bucket (2), I don’t see this type of transition occurring. These people weren’t just downloading content as a means to enjoy it; the process of discovering, downloading, building-out a collection, and being able to play-back from an exact catalogue of music you like is all part of the experience. For these consumers one of the values of a platform is the ability to get all the music they want and enjoy it exactly as they chose. These consumers may not be as numerous as those in bucket (1), but putting aside the means of download (i.e. iTunes sales may be mostly singles downloaded by bucket (1), but I’d guess a larger portion of total digital music downloads across the web come from bucket (2) with torrents and the like included), they represent the majority of the digital music market. And 'platforms' like Pandora, Spotify, YouTube (if you can even consider it as adequate at all in this context), and others will never replace the ability to build a personal collection.

iTunes may become obsolete soon enough as the less intensive consumers switch to such platforms as described, and the whole system of managing a collection may move to the cloud as well, but I don’t see the act of downloading and maintaining a personal music collection in general going anywhere.