A term sometimes bandied about by the "visionaries" of the tech industry. The term itself was coined by Paul Goldstein, a Professor of Law at Stanford, in his book Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. It gets a little complicated and long-winded, but the gist of it is this: Every piece of music ever recorded, made instantly available from anywhere in the world. For a small fee, of course.
Obviously, this has been one of the ideal paradigms of the Internet since the moment we all discovered "new media". Getting there is the tricky part. What seems to be the most popular theory, and the one put forward by Goldstein himself, is the idea of a satellite-based network which receives music requests and then beams them directly to a walkman-like streaming audio player. Or maybe they'll use fiber-optic cables and wave radios. To be honest, the details are a bit fuzzy. Goldstein is, after all, a copyright expert, not a hacker.
It should also be noted that, despite all the buzzwords and rosy idealism, there are many who have suggested that the "celestial jukebox" may not be such a good thing.
On the upside, of course, you've got on-demand music, anytime, anywhere. However, on the downside, such a plan would also result in absolute control of the music by the copyright holders, and by extension, the corporations that sponsor them.
Goldstein admits that one of the very first goals of a company running a "celestial jukebox" would be to make the service so inexpensive that users wouldn't even think about copying the music. After all, why take the time to burn copies for all your friends when they could just as easily pay a dime and hear it right away. By the time everyone was signed up with the service, copyright issues would almost become moot. Of course, that also means that the old, static style of media that we've been using for a century would become more and more rare.
Instead, every time you pay your dime, you haven't really purchased anything at all. No matter how many times you play The Knack's My Sharona on the jukebox at your local bar, you never actually own the album. Now imagine if your walkman or your stereo were the same way...
Besides that, imagine if The Knack decide that they want to change the song. They've had a run-in with Dr. Dre, they've developed street cred. They want to turn the song into a hip-hop anthem about "my Shaniqua". Or perhaps some censor along the way finally decided that "I always get it up for the younger kind" is simply far too racy for the god-fearing youth of America. Changing the lyrics is as easy as swapping in a new track and throwing out the old one. Oops. Good luck finding the original version now that bootlegs and hard copy have become a thing of the past...
My My My My My
Woo!