> Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music?
1. It's a chore to even do it
2. Consumer landlines are generally very asymetric. I have an ADSL line providing 1.1 MB/s (no typo) down, but 75kB/s up. I have 32GB of music on this machine (in lossy encodings). It would take me 3 weeks and 4 days uninterrupted to push that to "the cloud". Not only would make my internet connection completely unusable in the meantime (I don't have a QoS router), 3 weeks before I can truly use the service is hardly seamless.
If uploading is so hard, then why is Dropbox so successful? I'm on the max plan and I don't have any problems syncing. Sure, it takes a looooong time, but I expect it so I'm ok with it. Make the uploading automatic & out of sight and most people will have no trouble at all.
I assume it's successful in part because very few people upload the full 2GB quota in their first ten minutes of using Dropbox. I installed it, poked around with a couple of MP3s and PDFs, and then stopped. I doubt many users of Dropbox upload more than a couple hundred MB at a time.
1. It's a chore to even do it
2. Consumer landlines are generally very asymetric. I have an ADSL line providing 1.1 MB/s (no typo) down, but 75kB/s up. I have 32GB of music on this machine (in lossy encodings). It would take me 3 weeks and 4 days uninterrupted to push that to "the cloud". Not only would make my internet connection completely unusable in the meantime (I don't have a QoS router), 3 weeks before I can truly use the service is hardly seamless.