Cloud Music: How Hard Do Online Streaming Services Rock?
Cloud music services promise to rock the digital world and reinvent the way we discover new artists, songs and albums. By saving your music online, and letting you instantly stream tunes anytime, anywhere over the Internet to PCs or mobile devices, they simultaneously eliminate concerns with storage, synching and piracy.
The field continues to boom for cloud music services, which let you house a single library of tunes or an entire digital music collection online, then access it on-demand from dozens of gadgets (smartphone, tablet PC, portable media player, etc.). But while services like Spotify, Amazon Cloud Player, Mog and Rdio have millions of fans singing a happy tune, record labels and execs fear their growing power to upend the digital music industry. Who can blame them? With even Apple and Google now eyeing the streaming online music space, iTunes may soon be the least of their worries.
In the first episode of our new running video series, Gear Up, we review the best cloud music services to discover whether or not they’ll have you singing a happy tune. And, of course, we consider just how likely they are to really represent the future of digital entertainment.