This weekend I just finished uploading my music collection to my Amazon Cloud Drive. Not only did this take the better part of a month -- the collection eventually weighed in at 100GB -- but I also had to spend a few hours in iTunes making AAC versions of the songs that I had ripped from my old CD collection. (Amazon does not allow upload of the "Apple Lossless" format) Despite the recent news about Apple's forthcoming "iCloud" service, I'm confident that I made the right choice by going with Amazon.
I have always been a music lover, but like most people in their mid-thirties, the music I love most is what I was listening to in my late teens through my twenties. I still seek out new bands, but the core of my music collection is what I was listening to during the times of my life when I was still discovering who I was. The passion I had for going to live shows, reading music blogs like Pitchfork, and rifling through the bins at Other Music is not gone entirely, but it is greatly reduced as the priorities and pressures in my life have shifted. Five years ago I decided to rip my 1,000 or so CDs onto a hard drive, and then pack them up along with the CD player to store at my parent's house. Since then I've downloaded a lot more music from various sources (eMusic, iTunes, etc...), leaving an external hard drive the only place where my music collection exists in its entirety.
Every article I've read about Apple's "iCloud" touts that their service analyzes your music, mirrors it, and makes it available in the "iCloud" application. It eliminates the need to spend all the time uploading your music to anyone's cloud, and I can completely understand why this is a huge bonus for many people. I, however, am looking for not only a cloud-based player for my music collection, but a way to ensure that I will always have this music collection available to me forever. With all my music on Amazon's Cloud I now have enough redundancy between my cloud drive, my primary hard drive and my second hard drive (where I periodically do a backup of the primary) that I feel comfortable knowing I will always have access to the music that was an essential part of my life for so many years.
There are other reasons why I think my choice of Amazon will be proven right over time. Both Apple and Google are going to put out a cloud service that will be part of a larger strategy to drive customers to their own mobile operating systems. This means less across-the-board accessibility. Amazon already has an Android app for their service. And while Apple will never allow an Amazon Music Cloud App in their app store, Amazon recently tweaked their online player to work on an iOS device.
I think it's likely that at some point the idea of music ownership will go the way of physical media. Kids who are just a couple of years away from having a meaningful relationship with music may find that a Facebook music service powered by Spotify or a similar product may satisfy their needs. For someone my age that had a tangible music collection that was such an integral part of their own personal development, Amazon seems like the right choice.
Of course the true test will be if I ever decide it's safe to throw out the boxes of CDs the next time I'm visiting my parents...