There’s an ever-growing number of online music services out there, but none of them have really nailed it for me. Here’s my list of demands:
- Instant Purchase – Simple one or two click purchase, which adds it to my portfolio. Downloading from one place and uploading to another is dumb.
- Standard format/no DRM – This is why subscription-based services won’t work.
- Automatic Download/Sync – As seamless as DropBox, maybe even with a few rules (per playlist, etc).
- Smart Playlists – The only reason I use iTunes is that I can set up playlists with dynamic criteria, like “stuff I like that I haven’t heard in 2 weeks”. This entails tracking what I listen to and being able to rate stuff.
- Upload My Own – No reason for me to have to buy things again. I’m fine with paying a small extra fee for this, but I should also be able to work that off by buying new stuff. Amazon hosts stuff I’ve bought from them for free, but charges me for uploads, so in the long run they could actually end up costing me more. They should give me a 50MB bonus per album to upload other files.
- Mobile – My phone is my music player now, I should be able to stream/sync/download from it as well as my computer.
Bonus Features
- API – Let me have another program talk to your service to do things like recommendations and missing tracks.
- Podcasts – This doesn’t necessarily have to be done in-service, if the API allowed uploads someone else could do it, but it seems pretty trivial to add on if all of the above things are in place.
Don’t Really Care
- Sharing – Nice to have but I’d be fine with a service I can’t share. I’d prefer the option to sign into more than one account at a time.