Some interesting news comes today from The Independent, stating that Nationwide Insurance will be the first company to insure your digital music. It’s about time insurance companies got up to speed with technology. If your computer is stolen and you have this specific type of insurance, you will be covered for the value of your physical computer and its “intangible assets” such as digital music and other entertainment downloads.
However, I’m wondering if they will be willing to foot the bill for the labor of purchasing all of those digital files, converting them to a digital format from CDs or other such tasks. Unfortunately, there are many songs on my iPod that are hard to find and purchased legally (your songs are only insured if you have proof that you legally purchased them) from random sites I have long forgotten, so being reimbursed for just the songs would only go halfway.
For Nationwide’s digital music insurance to even be viable for the new age of techies, there would need to be further compensation to cover this time spent acquiring music. If someone has a massive collection of music on their 60GB iPod that they have been building for 10 years, money can only go so far. Money won’t help you remember every single song that you had so you can re-download it.
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I guess people need to start to make a database of their music and keep it on USB flash drive. Of course, I really doubt that this service will really work but we shall see.
Nationwide aims to capitalise on the biggest downside of digital music; having all your music conveniently aggregated in one place also means everything may be lost altogether in an instant.
However, I think a reliable backup solution is probably a better long-term investment than insurance. A portable hard drive doesn’t cost much these days. Getting insurance may compensate for the loss financially to a certain extent, but doesn’t account for the anguish and tedium of having to rebuild one’s entire collection.
Insurance would be penny wise, pound foolish in a way. Spend the money on a portable hard drive and with a proper backup regimen, your digital music should be safe.
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Good point, weisheng. I didn’t really think about it but a portable hard drive is a better use of your money and its probably easier to replace. People have enough trouble with insurance companies as it is. This will just make it more complicated and harder to follow through on the promise.
People should save their money and invest in backups.
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But then again this isn’t just for portable devices.. if your home computer gets boosted or destroyed in a fire, you’ll be covered. How many people keep backups of their files at places other than their own home?
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the real question though is – will nationwide give you a cheaper policy if you practice regular, multisite backups?
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MP3tunes has a music locker for $40 per year. It gives you UNLIMITED storage. They also give you impressive syncing tools so you can easily load all the music from multiple computers PLUS playlists. And if you need to retrieve it you can sync all or just portions of the music to any of your computers.
They also have a nifty web locker so you can play your music from any location or on your Tivo or your PDA well you get the point. It’s better than insurance because it has every day value.
You can sign up for a free locker that can store up to 1gb at http://mp3tunes.com/signup
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the independant article was wrong.
if you call nationwide insurance they are like “what are you talking about? we don’t have that”. i tried to contact the author of the article but have not heard back yet.
also, insurance is a way better idea that backups overall because disks lose their usability and no matter how many external hard drives you get, then can always crash. are you really goign to backup the backups of your backed up backups or would you rather just pay x% of the cost of your purchase to know that they are entirely and reliably safe?
insurance is clearly the better way to go.