Why Apple Might Be Your Best Bet for This ‘Cloud Music’ Thing
For more than a decade now, you’ve been able to store your music on a server in the cloud and stream it to yourself on computers and even mobile devices – but until now, that was mostly the domain of geeks and folks like me whose job it was to test the stuff.
Oh, how times have changed. Digital music is now mainstream, with the possible tipping point occurring in 2003 when Oprah Winfrey gave her audience 15GB Apple iPods. Now that we’re all accustomed to downloading music and carrying it around on a phone or audio player, another activity is set to hit the mainstream: cloud-based music services, which store your music on a server somewhere, doling out songs as necessary to an ever-expanding number of devices.
Amazon and Google have already launched their first forays into this brave new world, but those services are hampered by a lack of record label licensing, and as such, they are essentially glorified hard drives: You have to upload every song yourself — a process that can literally take up to a week, hogging your computer’s processor and your internet connection’s bandwidth, as I have discovered by testing similar services.
