Make a commitment to music in the cloud
— -- In one of their early hit singles, the Rolling Stones asked us in no uncertain terms to get off of their cloud. In 2012, Apple, Amazon and Google are inviting you to climb on to theirs, and they'd like you to bring your music library.
It's all about Internet — or cloud-based — music storage. It's becoming the new norm. But as free-spirited as that sounds, there's no real opportunity for experimentation here. You'll be making a commitment of sorts. Who knows how interchangeable they'll be in the future? So let's look at how to determine which service is right for you.
Apple just a few weeks ago released iTunes Match, which stores your music in the cloud and streams it to your gadgets. Google started selling digital music in November and also offers cloud storage. Amazon pioneered the option of cloud-based delivery and storage back in March.
These three heavyweights are all competing for the estimated $7 billion per year spent on online music. All three services are good, but each has quirks, too.
Deciding which to use starts — at least for now — with your choice of media player and your listening preferences. While iTunes Match is probably slightly better in the balance, that isn't going to matter if your smartphone or tablet is an Android, for instance.
iTunes Match for Apple's iCloud and iTunes is $25 a year. With iCloud and the latest version of iTunes, Apple started moving away from syncing devices. When you download a new song, book or TV show, it automatically appears on all your Apple devices.
To take advantage of this, you have to get your music library on iCloud. When you subscribe to iTunes Match, it scans every song you have in your iTunes library, including songs you've imported from CDs.
It looks for matches from the 20 million songs in the iTunes store and automatically adds those matches to iCloud. Songs are immediately available to all your Apple gadgets.
If you have a few songs that Apple doesn't, iTunes uploads them from your computer. Apple provides 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage free for those replacement files. If you have a lot of music it doesn't recognize, you can add more storage for a yearly fee.
You can have up to 25,000 songs on iTunes match. Anything bought from the iTunes store doesn't count against this storage total. An advantage is that matched songs play back at a high-quality bit rate of 256kbps, even if your original copy is lower quality.
Although iTunes and iTunes Match work fine on a PC laptop or desktop at home, they're really meant for Apple gadgets. The service won't work at all with Android smartphones and tablets.
Amazon's MP3 store rivals iTunes, with more than 17 million songs. It's biggest strength: The songs will work on any computer or gadget.
Amazon's Cloud Drive basic service is free and gives you 5GB of storage, good for about 1,000 songs. Adding 20GB of extra storage costs $20 per year. Songs bought from Amazon's MP3 store can be automatically added to Cloud Drive, and they don't count against your storage limit.
Unlike iTunes Match, you must manually upload your existing music — a time-consuming process. It also means you'll fill up your cloud storage much more quickly.
Once the songs are uploaded, you can stream or download them with other gadgets. Streaming saves space on your mobile device, but your playback could stutter if you're moving in and out of Wi-Fi coverage.
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