I read an assertion in an article a few days ago that within a decade we would have personal music players capable of holding every music recording ever made -- which struck me as unlikely, but I was curious how close it was. After all, as the article points out, we currently have 2.5 inch drives that hold 0.3 terabytes...
One (conservative) estimate of the amount of commercially available music is six million songs (http://boingboing.net/2008/02/18/worlds-most-complete.html). At about three minutes each, that's 18 million minutes, or 34 years of songs. Encoded at approximately a megabyte a minute, that's 18 terabytes. If storage space on a hard drive continues to double every two years, we should have 20 terabyte 2.5 inch drives in about 12 years. So "music players with every song within a decade" are at least within the bounds of possibility.
Of course, no electronics company has an incentive to sell music players that big, so you'd need a service like the one in the article to build it. :)
The ave 3min/song estimate is probably a little low. Radio edits are around that length but the original tracks tend to be longer. (Seen another way; most CDs are longer than 30min but tend to have 10 tracks, since many of the contracts will effectively not pay royalty on tracks > 10)
Every song put out through a record label, or actually every song? I highly doubt there's any drive at anytime in the future that will be able to hold every piece of music (no matter how bad) produced .. ever.
This company is a great example of why the market is so much more important than your idea. A simple business of fixing and upgrading iPods, marketed online, brings in millions per year. Simple and brilliant.
That's good to know, when my 160GB eventually dies I don't want to start leaving stuff off my iPod. Only have about 15k tracks on it, but that still uses 130GB.
I use it as a portable HDD sometimes so it's always nice to have more space for that too.
Who listen 50,000 songs, that is enough songs to last a lifetime : - ). Seriously it will take a little more than 3 months of listening time. I’m impressed.
A lot of times, I'll get an album because I like one song I've heard from it, or because I like other albums from the same artist, and then even if I don't, right now, like most of what I got, there's no reason to actually throw away the ones I don't. Even if I never end up liking those other songs, at least having them will keep me from wasting time getting them again in the future when I notice the hole in my collection or album and wonder if, just maybe, I'd like those other songs...
Disk space is cheap enough, in other words, that it's easier to just keep songs than keep an updated list of songs that you don't want.
This is a specific case of something that has held for a while, namely that it is never economical to spend more than an extremely minimal amount of time "cleaning up" a disk. It's always cheaper to just buy another bigger one.
