Google, Amazon and Apple all want you to stick your music in a cloud. Meanwhile, as we all know, Facebook has teamed up with Spotify to hook you into a cloud with music already in it. I can't tell who's gonna win this fight, if anyone, so I'm trying everything. Here are my reviews of each puffy cloud:
1. Spotify - Unlike Amazon, Apple and Google, Spotify doesn't let you upload anything. Instead, you can play anything in their library for free (plus anything it finds on your hard drive). As the partnership with Facebook would suggest, Spotify places a strong emphasis on social listening. You can see what your friends are listening to, subscribe to their playlists and even listen to music together with Soundrop (one of several "apps" now available from within Spotify, which is itself a stand-alone application). Spotify is a lot of fun, simpler to use in many respects than the other 3 cloud apps, and is particularly suited for exploring new sounds. It's also great in that, although you do have to download the app to use it, you don't have to spend any time uploading or "matching" songs. There is also a mobile app for Android and iOS, but you'll have to pay $10 a month to use it.
2. iTunes Match - To use this, you need to have songs in an iTunes library and you can't have more than 25,000 songs (not including iTunes Store purchases). Assuming you meet those two qualifications, for $25 a year you can keep all your songs in the cloud. Since the iTunes Store likely already has a copy of most of the songs in your library, it only uploads what it needs to. This can save a whole lot of time and is one of the cooler features of iTunes Match. Obviously if you don't like iTunes and/or don't have an iOS device, this is not for you.
3. Google Music - You're limited to 20,000 songs but unlike Apple, Google actually lets you pick and choose what gets uploaded. If you have more than 20,000 songs, you can still use the service - you can either let Google choose 20,000 for you or pick them yourself. Upload speeds are good but unlike Apple, you really do have to upload every single song. Of course, since it's Google they not only support Android devices but also iOS (via HTML5). Google also supports a decent range of filetypes: not only mp3 and aac but also wma, ogg and FLAC (although some of these get transcoded to mp3 format after uploading, which is a bummer). But probably the nicest thing about Google Music is that you don't need to download a separate app to play your songs - they'll play right from your web browser on music.google.com. Actually, scratch that - the nicest thing about Google Music is that it's completely free.
4. Amazon Cloud Player - This is marketed more like a side benefit of buying Amazon Cloud storage. If you plunk down $20 (or more if you want more storage) for 20GB, you also get unlimited music uploading. Plus, like Google you can play your music from any web browser. There's also an app for Android and iPad (although not iPhone, oddly). This would probably beat Google Music's sorry ass except for two things: 1. Fewer file formats are supported (only mp3 and aac, although at least there are no transcoding shenanigans) and 2. The Uploader app is a total piece of shit. This really disappointed me - I was all set to let the uploader run for a week or so, uploading my 80,000+ songs (what, you don't have that many? I guess you must hate music) but then I noticed every time it would finish uploading a song, it would sit there for 2-3 minutes before continuing to the next one! If you do a little multiplication, that means it would take somewhere between 160,000-240,000 minutes to upload all of my songs. That's about 3-6 months. I think I'll wait for them to fix that bug.
