Apple iCloud or Google Music or Amazon Cloud..??

Apple iCloud, Google Music, Amazon Cloud

The last few months have seen the emergence of three different services from big players designed to give users cloud-based access to their personal music libraries. With smartphones, tablets or iPads, laptops, and home computers, it's no wonder that consumers are looking for a better way to store and have access to their often large libraries of digital music. Amazon was the first to announce its Cloud Drive storage service a few months back, and it's the only cloud-based music service that is completely available to users as of today. Google recently announced its highly-anticipated Google Music Beta service, but like the name suggests, it's still in an invite-only beta testing stage, although anyone can request an invite and hope to be chosen. To round out the group of three, Steve Jobs announced Apple's iCloud service last week at WWDC, which offers a host of cloud-storage features including the speculated iTunes integration. While it will be hard to tell which service will win out in the end until all three are available for full use, there are significant difference between the services that users and music lovers should be aware of.

Price and availability

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon is offering 5GB of storage for free to anyone with an Amazon account, but we all know that will only cover a fraction of most users' libraries. You can store 20GB for $20 a year. Extra storage beyond that costs about $1 per GB in increments of 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1,000. If you have less than 20GB of music it's not a bad deal, but if your library is larger you might be paying more than you'd like. One plus is that songs purchased through the Amazon MP3 store won't count towards your storage limits. Like we mentioned before, the Amazon service is the only one that's fully available to the public currently.

Google Music Beta

The Google service is invitation-only for now, but will roll out to consumers in the near future and intrigued Google fans can always request an invite to test the service. Music Beta is the only totally free service, but it's unclear whether that will stay true when the service is fully unveiled to the public. Because of Google's history of keeping things free, we expect the service to come in at a very user-friendly price tag. We wouldn't be surprised if Music Beta offered a limited amount of storage to users for free, similar to Amazon.

Apple iCloud

The full functionality of iCloud won't be available until the fall, so we have a while to wait before we will see the success or failure of Apple's foray into storing music in the cloud. In the big picture, iCloud will be free, but there's a small catch. While iCloud will offer unlimited iTunes storage in the cloud for free, many users may want to use a companion service called iTunes Match to take full advantage of the service. Initially, iCloud will scan your iTunes library and put any song purchased in iTunes into the cloud. Other songs can be manually uploaded, or users can use iTunes Match, which will try to find a match for all of the non-iTunes songs in your library in the iTunes store. As long as there is a match in the store, you will get all the benefits of having the song in iCloud, just like a song you purchased through iTunes. The matching service will cost users $25 each year.