More Abundance by Owning Less

Less is more; let the music show you how. We've witnessed the progression: albums to compact discs to digital files a la iTunes, where each step takes less material and less effort to get the music to the listener. Now, internet radio (places like SOMA FM and Pandora) draws the material piece down to nothing (although maybe there's a greater bandwidth component if you're continuously piping music across the airwaves, instead of just once at purchase, as is the case with digital files). 

What's interesting with Pandora and its Genome Project is that you can listen to anything you can think to name, plus associated stuff you might not even know, where all of this musical cornucopia is tailored to your tastes. A greater abundance at your beck than were you to merely own it, random and expansive, not confined to the sometimes tiresome limits of an iPod. 

Less is more, an example of having more by owning less, even though this model is thus far confined to limited areas of our lives, like music and movies and literature. Maybe, though, the chief value of the Pandora model is getting us accustomed to the idea of loaning instead of owning. Coming generations could be more comfortable with an ethic that eschews acquiring and owning things, setting the stage for companies to move from providing a good to providing a service (and thus to control a product over its life cycle, and to create sustainable, closed loop systems). Best real world example: the failed attempt by Interface to lease carpets (described in Ray Anderson's Confessions of a Radical Industrialist). 

Manufacturers might be more successful implementing Extended Producer Responsibility Policies if consumers came to the table comfortable with leasing, and versed in the benefits of closed-loop recycling. Customers accustomed to borrowing their music would be less inclined to feel the need to own their carpet.

Art: Rusty Russ on flickr 

(My favorite backdrop for writing or other thinking: Lemongrass on Pandora).