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[perkiset]

There's a growing voice in the buzmill that the new cloud music lockers are going to make downloading music an anachronism.

Particularly for the rumored Apple offering, which (supposedly) will see what tracks you've purchased and automatically move them into your locker so that you don't need to upload, this seems attractive (Neither Google or Amazon have the agreements in place with the labels to provide this yet).

From a top-down perspective, this sort of thing makes sense as well: if you have track (A) in your locker as does about a million other people, why shouldn't there be a single instance of that song and simply an indexed pointer in your locker? Then the services could house LOTS more music and even better, if the artist/label/service provider whatever gets a 256b version rather than 128b, instantly, everyone gets an upgrade. But how many people want to be network-separated from their music? How many times have you gone into a building and suddenly lost 3G?  Additionally, there's the startup stream time - Apple has a patent for keeping the beginnings of songs on your device so that you get instant start, but who knows? There's the upside, which is that your car could now stream your library, but we can do that with our smartphones and an adapter right now.

I'm just really curious if you're interesting in the cloud locker. I *think* I am (particularly because of backups and not chasing drives) but am looking for the killer reason.

[daviator]

I don't find it all that appealing, at least not today or anytime soon.

1.  As you touch on, wireless broadband reliability and availability is far from what it should be.  Here in San Francisco, I would say that my 3G data connection fails - which I define as "I'm unable to do whatever it is that I am trying to do because the signal is unavailable, or so weak that applications time out or can't connect" - about 30-40% of the time I'm trying to do something.  Really, I'm not exaggerating.  It's probably closer to 30% outside and 40% inside.  Hell, I can't even connect reliably from within my home (so thank goodness for WiFi.)  A cloud-based service is worthless unless its availability is pretty much ubiquitous, and I do not see ubiquitous reliably, fast cellular broadband on the five year horizon.

2.  I have lots and lots of music that is not and will never be available from the iTunes store (remixes of songs and the like, many of which were not sold commercially) and I am not sure I find many reasons why it would be in my interest to upload all of that stuff to a cloud-based service instead of just keeping it under my own control.  I do like the fact that the cloud stuff would be (hopefully) safe and secure and I wouldn't have to worry about backups any more, but the hassle of having to upload stuff and then only being able to listen to it when I have a strong broadband connection doesn't really excite me.

3.  The service would be completely useless, at least mostly, when traveling outside the U.S., as I do occasionally, unless you think that foreign cellular telcos are going to start giving free bandwidth away to roaming users.  I can hardly afford to send email using my iPhone when traveling internationally.  The cost of streaming music from the cloud would result in a phone bill that would cause cardiac arrest upon opening.

The only benefits I really see are these: access to my entire music library at any time (rather than just whatever I have uploaded into my mobile device) and not having to worry about backups.  Since I'm not even that frequent of an iPod-functionality user (I listen to iPhone-based music while at the gym, really almost nowhere else) this isn't a big benefit for me.  At home, which is where I listen to music the most, I have easy access to my entire music library.  So the cloud is really just a backup solution.  For that, it'd better be cheap.

Some people who have earbuds plugged into their brain 20 hours out of the day may love the service.  I just can't find much reason to spend money on it.

If they started building the technology into car stereos and it was reliable, that might be somewhat compelling.  Full access to your music in the car.  But if it's gonna cut out ever time I enter a tunnel or go through an area with poor signal, I'm not interested.  For me, this is a solution searching hard for a problem.

[perkiset]

Nutballs has been postulating that the iCloud will be much more than just music, and I find his projections quite interesting. Essentially, "Also Music" rather than it being the primary thing. The interesting thing to me is that Apple has failed cloud 101 what, like 4 times already? I think that there problem is they focus too much on the desktop Mac being the center of the universe, rather than the cloud - which IMO for the cloud methodology it has to be. Well, at least for certain things.

So I'm actually more interested than usual to see what Apple's got up it's sleeve. The NC datacenter is almost ridiculously over powered for just music, and the banners at Moscone are already graphically saying, "Lion + 5 + Cloud == WWDC." The rumors from so-called insiders and the music industry are that "people are really going to be wowed with what Apple's got to offer" and I speculate that none of them have the whole picture. So it's conceivable that there's something rather exciting in the works. And if Nutballs predictions are anything close to true, it will be a blast taking the new mechanisms out for a spin.

But back on topic, I am interested in seeing how Apple defeats your criticisms, which I think are both spot on an typical. If they don't, and mom and dad try to cloudify their music, it's going to fail spectacularly. So assuming that Apple knows they need mom and dad, I am intrigued to see what solutions they've come up with.