Rock 'n' Roll Meets Storage

Posted by byteandswitch.com on January 11, 2008

Tags: Backup & Recovery,  Infrastructure

Channel: Backup & Recovery, Data Center

It's only rock 'n' roll but it's content. And it's generating a quiet revolution in the music business, one that bodes a new era in specialized storage networking and services.

Thirty years on, Internet access to Zeppelin performances, Cream's multimedia PBS archive, and the Allman Brothers Band's merchandising Website is fast and easy. But the fact is, many long-established musicians and record companies are failing to profit from the digital revolution.

In New York last year, a Time Warner Music executive told this author, "We make less on digital downloads than we did on CDs." When asked what he was planning to do about that situation, he said only, "I don't know."

This disconnect between artists and their fans is open to a solution that includes digital storage. A few artists and their record firms are generating profits from the storage and distribution of their own digitized musical content. Let's take a look at how this is happening.