I find myself concerned though, when services like this become centralized (and the same goes for iTunes), about the “llama’s ass…” which I’m pretty sure is a quote from a Wesley Willis song. I mean, streaming services make sense as a main*stream*… but there will always be a place for the underground (or rhizome) nature of mp3s, much as vinyl is great, but cassettes are more mutable.

Also, as you’ve mentioned many times before, the value in the “song” is not just in the encoded audio, but in the entire envelope. Whether this becomes a strict namespace per music artifact, referencing sheet music, licensing, artwork and provenance to a single url, or something cloudier, I couldn’t say. But this is something mp3 can’t provide. Once it’s on my iPod, because there is no associated provenance, I don’t know where the hell it came from, and this is a liability.