To cloud or not to cloud? With the recent announcement of Apple's iCloud service coming in the fall, there are now three major cloud based music services either planned or already operational:
Amazon Cloud Player - Amazon was the first to roll out their cloud. If you sign up for the service, all of your MP3 purchases are automatically added to the cloud drive. You are given 5 GB of free storage at sign up. If you buy an MP3 album from Amazon at any price, you are given 20 GB of storage. Sounds great, huh? Not so fast. That 20 GB expires in a year, which means they will bill you $20.00 to keep that 20 GB of "free" storage. The good news is that any music you purchase from Amazon doesn't count against your storage cap, only music that you upload. You can play your music from up to eight devices, including any web connected computer or Android mobile device. What's that? You have an iPhone? Sorry, Charlie! You still have to download the music to your hard drive and sync it the old fashioned way. You can upload other types of documents as well, including photos and video, but as far as I can tell, you can't edit the documents in the cloud, the way you can with Google Docs The storage plans cost $20.00/yr for 20 GB, $50/00 for 50 GB and so on up to $1000.00/yr for 1000 GB of storage.
Google Music Beta - I don't have much information yet, since, as the name suggests, it is still in the beta stage. I do know that when I signed up, my cloud drive was pre-loaded with around 200 free songs, some good ones too, ranging in style from Cab Calloway to Modest Mouse to Alice Cooper (probably because I checked a fairly wide range of music style preferences when I signed up.) No info on storage capacity or pricing yet, but I am told I can upload up to 20,000 songs for free at this time. I expect to see a pricing structure similar to Amazon once it is fully unveiled. Once again, I can only play the music on a PC or an Android device (up to eight devices), no iPhone functionality. It is music only, no documents, but Google already has Google Docs for documents and Picasa for photos, which work great.
iCloud - Apple's cloud service won't be rolled out until the fall, so all I know is what Steve Jobs tells me. We do know that you will only be able to play your iCloud music on IOS devices, (computers with iTunes installed, iPhones, etc), which is good for me, maybe not so much for non Apple users. The one thing that is intriguing is iTunes Match. For $25 per year, iTunes will scan your library and replace your non-iTunes purchased music with high quality (256 kbps) versions, regardless of how it was acquired, no laborious uploading. If it can't match the music, you can still upload it manually. There will be other types of storage available (documents, photos), but only accessible using Apple approved apps.
Being an Apple user, I will probably lean toward iCloud, but my big question about cloud based music is: what happens when the cloud fails? If I am basically streaming my music collection, what happens when I am in the bus tunnel, or out in some area where the phone or wi-fi service is spotty or non-existent?
Also, who owns the music that is stored in the cloud? Yes, it is my music that I purchased, but it is Apple's, (or Amazon's or Google's) server that is is stored on. Then, there are those pesky privacy issues.
I don't think that cloud based music will ever completely replace the files on your hard drive, the cd's on your shelf or the vinyl in your basement, but they will be a nice alternative for listening on the go.
There is also is issue of companies capping monthly G3 & G4 use at 5 Gig. I learned early on that you go through that amount if data usage in the blink of an eye-streaming from the cloud could eat through your data allotment very fast!
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