For more than a decade our music has traveled the path of cable, iPod, and earbud to make it to our ears. The next major battle in the music delivery revolution will not be won by the tethered sync, but by the streaming cloud.

Internet Radio

Internet radio has existed for decades. Early iterations came in the form of online radio stations that played songs chosen by a DJ to a set schedule. As computerized programming took over more stations could be broadcasted simultaneously adding greater selection.

Today’s music streaming services like Pandora allow for even more user customization. Instead of merely picking a stream, users can customize their listening experience around a genre, artist, album or track.

Pandora perfected the trend of catered music streaming by paying attention to the listening habits of its users.

Over 400 different musical attributes are considered when selecting the next song. These 400 attributes are combined into larger groups called focus traits. There are 2,000 focus traits. Examples of these are rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies, and displayed instrumental proficiency.

Despite all of its user control Pandora comes with a considerable amount of limitations. Pandora is limited to users inside the United States, and its software restricts the amount of skips and rewinds that can be performed each hour. Pandora is not an on-demand service. Streams are constructed from similar sounding music and never a single artist.

I am not a fan of Pandora or traditional radio. If I know what music I want to listen to than all the customizations in the world, or the best DJs can’t replicate my personal preferences on the radio.

Subscription Services

Rhapsody, Rdio, and Spotify provide the on-demand playback Pandora lacks. These second generation streaming services allow listeners to playback specific tracks from a large selection of music in any order they choose. Supported by advertising or a monthly fee, these services allow additional flexibility over streaming radio by offering playlist creation and offline listening. The downside of a music subscription service is the preselected library of songs. Users have no control over the tracks that are added to or removed from their subscription’s collection.

Subscription services are appealing because they give you unlimited access to a wide collection of music with playback you control. Great for finding new artists subscription services often lack the more obscure music I value most in my collection.

Cloud Storage

Apple, Amazon, and Google are taking a different approach to internet streaming music. Instead of asking users to subscribe to a curated collection of music these internet giants are allowing users to upload their own music collections and playback their songs from a compatible internet connected device.

The popularity of the iPod and iTunes have made Apple synonymous with music, but up until now Apple’s music delivery has been restricted to the one time download of purchased songs. Starting with iCloud, Apple is letting its customers re-download any track previously purchased from iTunes and automatically download all future iTunes purchases to all of their Apple devices. For a yearly fee of $24.99 iTunes Match will allow you to download any song you own from the iTunes catalog as a 256 kps AAC file, and songs that are not available in the iTunes Music Store can be uploaded to Apple’s servers for the same wireless availability. iCloud cuts the cable previously required for getting your music onto Apple’s devices, but Apple charges you for the privelage of syncing all of your own music wirelessly and the storage needed to hold your entire music collection.

Amazon Cloud Drive is a similar service to Apple’s iCloud where customers are given 5 GBs of online space to fill with music. Music that was purchased from Amazon’s MP3 store does not count against that space, and additional space costs one dollar per gigabyte per year. The difference between Cloud Drive and iCloud is the lack of Amazon branded devices. Because Amazon has no dedicated music players Cloud Drive streams your music onto any device with a web browser or Android devices running special software. Cloud Drive removes the need to download your entire music collection onto every device, but also restricts Amazon’s streaming service to devices that are constantly connected to the internet.

Apple’s iCloud downloads all of your music to all of your Apple devices, and Amazon’s Cloud Player plays your music on any internet connected device. Google Music offers the best of both worlds by making your entire music collection available for streaming from any internet connected device, and downloads selected albums to your Android equipped devices when you want to have a local copy. Uploading your music to Google Music is easy. Just download the Google Music Manager and point it to your music collection. Listening to music on Google Music is universal. Just point any HTML5 compatible browser to music.google.com and listen to any of your songs or playlists. The songs and playlists you store on Google Music can be played from any modern device and you are not restricted to devices made by Apple. Instant mixes are Google’s answer to Apple’s Genius playlists, and the way Pandora personalizes its own streaming stations. I used to backup all of my music to Dropbox to keep it in sync with all of my computers, but with Google Music I don’t have to. The offsite backup comes for free.

At this time there is no pricing for Google Music, but listening to my collection from anywhere in the world is worth a couple of dollars a month.