David Pakman was the long time CEO of eMusic and now works in venture capital.  In a post on his blog Disruption, he recently made the argument that We Need Digital Lockers More Than Ever. 

“We now live in a world where we have multiple devices on which we want to consume various forms of media: TVs, desktop PCs, laptops, smart phones, tablets, eBook readers, and more coming," he says.  "Anyone who wants to distribute media to us has a hard time providing it to us in a way that lets us - the consumers - choose how, where and when we want to consume it.” 

Given that TED recognized the members of their book club may not want to receive a huge package full of hardcovers; they decided to make it so the books on their list could be downloaded onto Kindles.  In realizing how “broken” this process really was, it got Packman thinking that perhaps it shouldn’t take the mediation of Amazon to grant him access to the eBooks on that list.

That maybe, he writes, “We need a locker. We need an open, authenticated location in the cloud where we can store, access, receive, organize, and share our digital media. Media is too fragmented online.”  Suppose he didn’t want those eBooks on his Kindle.  That way, he could receive his media in the locker instead of it being downloaded onto a local device.

His thinking: “Google might be the best company to deliver this service. They have the added benefit, at least for now, of not being a retailer of media."  To which he concludes, “Yes, some content owners hate this idea because they instead want to charge me each time I access their content (think about how many times you pay, one way or another, to see a movie). But now, more than ever, we need a digital locker in the cloud.” 

Do you agree with David?

What the digital locker mean for music?