Clouding your music...

Now that Apple has announced their upcoming iCloud service, it won’t be long before three technology giants (Google and Amazon’s versions are already available) will all offer their own take on cloud music services. If you’re unfamiliar, a cloud service is essentially a service that is based remotely on the internet. So having a cloud music service such as Google’s Music, means they give you an allotted space on their servers for you to store and stream your music from. So, is putting your music on the cloud a good idea?

Access your entire music library anywhere – While most of us simply choose our favorite songs and albums to put on our phones, I know there have been plenty of times that I wished I had loaded a particular album on my phone but either forgot to or couldn’t get it to fit on my phone with its limited space. If you pay for the extra cloud storage space, you’ll be able to have access to your entire music collection (within the service’s storage capacity) anywhere you are by simply streaming it to your phone or computer.

Having an online backup – While everyone should be backing up their computers anyway, putting your music on the cloud decreases the chances of you losing your music due to theft or a hard drive crash.

Syncing between devices – One of the most annoying aspects of managing a digital music collection can be keeping it organised and updated between all your devices. Each of the major cloud services allows you to stream your music to multiple devices so you don’t have to worry about keeping each one updated individually. Keep in mind that each service has their limitations such as Amazon’s Cloud Drive that lets you stream to your Android device, but not to any of Apple’s iOS devices.

Despite the benefits, keeping everything online does have its drawbacks. Because the music is streaming, it can rack up your phone’s data usage very quickly which can be extremely costly if you don’t have an unlimited data plan. So it’s probably a good idea to still keep the mp3s you listen to a lot stored locally on your phone instead of streaming. Also since cloud based storage is entirely online based, if you lose your internet connection you will be without your cloud music. Don’t forget that each of the cloud services has their limitations on how much cloud space you can get for free and what devices they are compatible with. Regardless of the limitations, I am personally looking forward to using Apple’s iCloud service so I can finally delete those mp3s I keep “just in case.”