All Your Music in the Clouds

There are several music lovers here at DL. We love to recommend new bands to each other and talk about our old favorites. If you walk around the office you will see several of us working with our earphones plugged in, listening to our iPods or streaming Pandora, but what would we listen to if we could access our entire music collection from the office?
The next wave in music is cloud music services. What exactly does this mean? Well imagine being able to access all your music anywhere. So now, rather than adding your entire music collection to an iPod or MP3 player, to listen to your music on the go you can simply upload your music library to a cloud service accessed through the internet
For over a year Google and Apple were rumored to be launching a cloud music service, but retail giant Amazon.com has beat them to the punch by releasing Cloud Player in March.

This service allows you to upload your music to Amazon servers and play them on the web or your Android device. Any MP3 purchases made on Amazon.com can be stored on the Cloud Player and downloaded multiple times. Users can also upload tracks from their home library to the cloud. Each user has 5 GB storage for free, but they are offering 20 GB for $20 a year with $1 per GB overages. However, since Amazon launched this service without obtaining music licensing from the record labels, the music industry is not happy.

Apple was rumored to have a cloud service in the works ever since they purchased streaming music service Lala in December 2009. Reports say that this will be a subscription based service that will give users a music locker, or they may try to run a music streaming service modeled after Netflix.

There have also been speculations that Google will be launching a music service. It was originally slated to be available in December 2010, but they have seemed to hit a dead end. It is thought Google was having issues working on licensing deals with the record labels.

Only time will tell who will be the next player in cloud based music game, but my bet is on Apple to revolutionize yet another untapped market.