Yesterday, I watched a technology presentation by Chris Anderson on TED.COM, recorded in 2004. He said that in 2008 (ie: now) you would be able to store 1 million songs on a hard drive costing about $400. Now, assuming that a MP3 is about 4meg big, you will need 4 million meg to store 1 million songs, or approx 4 Terabytes.

So I took this to the test. Currently, you can buy a 1 TB hard drive from BestBuy for $150, so a 4 TB drive will be about $600, so not too far off. In fact, it will probably be spot on by the end of the year. Hey, wait a year and you will probably be able to store 2 million songs.

Locally, a 750gig drive from Chaos is about R1600, which equates to approx R8500 for 4 TB of storage.

But what is really scary is that you can store over 1 million songs on your home computer for less than R10000, which is less than 10c per song! Now just pause and think about that. We can freely share music (mostly illegally) at no cost, and store it at an igsignificant cost. So, how is that going to affect the music industry?

Food for thought…

By the way, if the average song is about 5 minutes long, your new collection of 1 million songs will take about 9 1/2 years to play in its entirety!

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