Music in the Clouds.

Hello fellow Jabber Loggers and welcome to a late edition of Music Wednesday's. I have been playing the catch game lately due to the fact that I am on my last week of my Digital Studio class. I have a lot of design work to do and I'm juggling this with work and more importantly, my family. So I just wanted to touch base with everyone and speak briefly on a service that has been in Beta mode until yesterday when it was opened to the public. For the past several months, Google has been working on a music service to go head to head with iTunes and Amazon. Like their social network Google+, their music service dubbed, "Google Music Beta" , at the time, was made available to those who received an invite. After receiving this invite, the user was then allowed access to the service by uploading their music to Google's cloud service. There was a limit set to 20,000 songs and it was free. After uploading music, the user would then have the ability to take all of their music with them where ever they traveled. I thought this was pretty awesome and once I received an invite from a friend of mine, I began to upload music. Now, anyone who has ever uploaded anything knows that if you have a slow connection you might as well forget it and this was no different. I have a pretty fast Internet connection and it took forever to upload the music I wanted. On top of that there was no native application for the iPhone. The same thing happened when Google+ first arrived and with Google Music Beta the only way to access by phone was to use the Safari web browser. This was good in a sense but it was slow, choppy, and was nothing compared to the native application that was made available to those with an Android powered phone. It was a pain at first but things have improved some. Before the public release of Google Music there was a web application built to satisfy those without an Android phone. The application is a big improvement but it still lacks the finesse and structure of the Android app.

All in all I believe we are going to see the competition start to heat up between, iTunes, Google Music, and Amazon. Each have their own cloud service and just within a couple days, iTunes launched iTunes Match. This involves their cloud service and lets say that you are out at the store and you happen to download an album. Instead of having to connect your iPhone when you get home in order to transfer the music to your computer, it will already be there thanks to iTunes Match. As of right now, iTunes Match carries a subscription price of $24.99 per year. I'm not sure on the price of Amazon's cloud service, but Google Music remains free. With that said, remaining free puts Google in a great position to challenge the competition. Google has also opened a music store within the Android Market and if you have an Android powered phone then you're ahead of all those following the beat of Apple's drum like myself. In the end, the more important question is, who will you choose? Make sure to mark your choice below and we'll see who gets the most votes. Happy voting!

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