Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Having to sync all your music between devices is annoying. Luckily a number of cloud music services allow you to stream your music to nearly everything—laptops, tablets, smartphones—with minimal effort or tech know-how. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, depending on your needs; here's how to figure out which one's best for you."

Lifehacker takes a good look at the various cloud music services out there, and has a pretty balanced write-up on each of them. I do wonder, with data plans becoming more restricted in the US, and with most of the services aimed at the US market, would anyone really want to stream their music to their phones instead of just storing it on them?

"If you're reading this you probably don't need much background on Amazon Cloud Player - suffice it to say that Amazon launched a new "freemium" cloud storage service that's tied into their music store. You get 5GB of online storage for free and 20GB if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, and subsequent MP3 purchases don't count against the cap. There's also a Cloud Player app for Android that can play music files stored on your account - it doesn't matter if they're files you purchased from Amazon or elsewhere, and Amazon has tools that'll upload your DRM-free iTunes purchases to make a switch easy. None of this is particularly earth-shattering - as a loyal Amazon MP3 customer who's almost wholly switched to the subscription-based Rdio, I actually think most of these features are a couple years too late."

Nilay Patel shares some interesting thoughts on what's happened since Amazon launched their Cloud Player service - namely, that the music labels got upset. "How dare you listen to music you bought in any way other than via the hard drive that you downloaded it on"? is their basic message. How quaint. The record companies finally got wise and un-shackled our music from DRM - and I believe digital music sales are better than ever, partially because of that - and now they want to dictate how/when/where we listen to our music? I don't think so.