| 04 October 2011
If I was a gambling man, I would say that the era of physical media is coming to a close, and that includes physical hard drives. One of the biggest benefits of having online storage of everything would be the ability to forgo managing my physical music library - specifically, not having to lug around an iPod classic, or picking and choosing what songs to put on my iPhone's hard drive (which really should be devoted to apps/games anyway). I would like to be able to have a streaming music library.
For my own personal streaming needs, I only ask two things - 1) to be able to access and stream my music library on my iPhone as cheaply as possible and 2) to have my listens scrobble to last.fm (an essential for OCD music nerds like me). Here's a roundup of all the music services I've used or researched to meet these needs.
iTunes Match
$25/year
iTunes Match will scan your existing music library and if the song exists in the iTunes catalog, it will be associated with your iTunes account (and the song's quality will be upgraded too if the iTunes catalog version is higher). Songs not in your music library will be uploaded to your iCloud account, and not count towards your free 5GB of iCloud storage. You will then be able to access your library online, to download the songs onto 10 devices of your choosing, and, according to an off-hand comment made today at Apple's iPhone 4S reveal, you will be able to stream your songs. If this reads true, then for $25/year you'll have access to your entire music library (no matter how big) for streaming. No word on whether you can stream on the 3G network or if it's Wi-Fi only, and how well the streaming will perform. Also, I'm not sure if it'll use its own iPhone app, integrate into the iTunes app, or integrate into the iPod app. Also, today's comment is the first I've heard about streaming via iTunes Match, so it may have been a mistake.
Spotify
free, $10/month to stream to mobile phone
Spotify boasts a robust online catalog of music - including most songs found in iTunes, and obscure stuff - and also scrobbles to last.fm and integrates into Facebook in a non-obtrusive way. They have a pretty sweet desktop app that lets you build shared playlists, manage your physical media, and build an online library as well. If you pay their hefty $10/month fee you can also stream everything to your mobile phone, get rid of the commercials, and download songs for offline listening as well. I tried out the iPhone app for a couple of days, and it worked really well, and the audio quality was good. The only limitation to it is that it requires a fair amount of investment - you'll be spending a lot of time on the desktop app building your library from scratch just to be able to stream it easily on your iPhone.
Amazon Cloud Player
$20/year
Amazon's Cloud Player is the cheapest of the pay services, at $20 a year (for this first year, at least) for unlimited storage. Unfortunately, you have to upload your entire music library (which took me several days). Although they have an Android app for seamless integration, there is no such solution for iPhones. Instead, you'll have to navigate a barely-manageable web app. It does have a pretty nice iPad web app, so an iPhone app may be in the works. You can integrate the browser-based player to scrobble to last.fm through a Google Chrome extension, but there's no way to scrobble your mobile listens.
Google Music (Beta)
price unknown
Google's music service is in beta right now, but as it stands you currently have to upload your entire music library (also takes several days), and it has an upload limit of 20,000 songs. The browser player works fine, and it can scrobble to last.fm through a Google Chrome extension. It has a web app that works pretty well on the iPhone, although it often hangs up on the end of one song without going to the next. Being that it hasn't officially released yet, and there's no word on pricing, I can't really consider this service a contender right now.
Last.fm
free, $3/month to stream to mobile phone
Last.fm has its own service, which can either stream your existing library (based on the tracks you've already scrobbled), hear new music, or mix the two via different "radio" stations. The desktop app (which is the app that scrobbles your iTunes/WinAmp/etc listens) acts as a radio player as well. You'll have to pay $3/month to stream to the iPhone app; the app itself is a little slow and clunky, and the audio quality is pretty low. Also bear in mind that you won't have access to your whole library - only the songs that last.fm has in its library and is allowed to play - in other words, you'll often hear the same songs over and over.
Pandora
free, or $36/year for Pandora One
Lastly, there is Pandora, which is a great service if you're not interested in listening to a particular song on command. Instead, you'll build stations based on types of music or moods, by giving the tracks the station plays a thumbs up or down. This is a service that's been around for a while, and you can listen to it for free via your browser or an iPhone app (although you're limited to a certain amount of hours a month). For $36 a year you can get rid of the commercials and listening cap, have a higher quality audio, and a desktop app. The only way to scrobble your listens is to access Pandora through the handy integrated site lastpandora.com, which doesn't work on the iPhone.
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So who wins? At this point, it's hard to tell. When I'm on my main computer, I just listen to my iTunes collection. When I'm on a different computer - say, traveling with my laptop - then I use Spotify's desktop app. On my iPad I use the Amazon Cloud Player web app, although it doesn't scrobble to last.fm. Lastly, and most importantly, there's no simple solution for my iPhone right now. I would probably use Spotify if it didn't cost $10(!) a month just to stream, simply because it's pretty reliable and it scrobbles to last.fm. Amazon and Google's solutions are too wonky to manage while driving, but could possibly get better with dedicated iPhone apps. Secretly, my money's on iTunes Match, if only because it might offer the most seamless iOS experience. One thing is for sure, though - no single service offers the total package for a reasonable price; for the foreseeable future, I'll be sporting an iPod Classic.
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