Hardcore music lovers: isn't this cloud nine?

Amazon, Google and Apple are ushering in a new era of digital music listening, and it's so very nice

Amazon Cloud Drive. Google Music Beta. And, finally, Apple iCloud + iTunes Match.

They are quite possibly three of the most ill-named products in recent memory, and yet, they stand for a new revolution in digital music that closes the loop first opened by the iPod a decade ago. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true.

We’ve had some pretty great music services for awhile now, but the truth is that most have focused on targeting the casual or mainstream listener only.

Just look at Apple: the iTunes Store and its partner-in-crime, the iPod, stand as decade-strong symbols that the mainstream music industry need not collapse under the weight of piracy. You can charge for music, even if it’s just a dollar for a song.

Owning isn’t everything, however, so companies soon emerged to serve up streaming music, a super convenient and pleasant way to listen to music. Pandora comes immediately to mind. All you have to do is type in your favorite artist, or the one with the mood you want, and music you love and know will flow from your speakers.

If you’re not into radio’s programmed spontaneity, then you can pay small monthly fees (often just $5 or $10) for a subscription service like MOG, Rdio or Slacker. They let you stream what you want, as much as you want, to the device you want. Simple and effective.

The point here is that the new, technological music industry has for many years now largely catered to the casual listener and the casual listener alone. If you’re somebody who only needs Michael Jackson and the latest Top 40, then you’re set.

It makes sense for an emerging industry to target the mainstream audience and casual listeners. You need as large a user base as you can find.

But then there are people like me. People who live their lives for music.

Consider this: my iTunes collection right now sits at just over 25,000 songs and just under 200 GB; if I played it all straight through, 83.5 days would pass before silence struck our ears. Unsurprisingly, I’m far from having the biggest library among my brethren.

It’s less about quantity, though, and more about quality. Not just quality of the sound file (which is obviously important), but quality of the actual music. I’m talking about the truly music-obsessed.

The music-obsessed, like those DJs that scour across the least visited blogs and in the most underground record cellars--each a kind of distant star in the universe of music shopping--in search of that obscure disco track or that rare dub cut. The “music-obsessed,” like that girl who leaves the party early--not angry, just disappointed--because you abruptly cut off her favorite album two songs short; it’s better that she leave, she’s no longer in the mood to party anyway.  

Our tunes are very important to us, and the music world, to the music-obsessed, is much larger than what one could find in the databases of all the major record labels combined. If you added the majority of the independents too, you’d be getting closer, but you wouldn’t be there yet. Forget about trying to find all your favorites in the iTunes or Amazon store.

This is exactly why I could never get on board with any music offering from any company so far. Up until now, my favorite was MOG, for a variety of reasons: you can stream to most any device, the MP3 quality is 320 kbps (the highest possible), the collection is strong and the company really feels like its made up of music lovers.

But then I started searching for some of my favorite songs and albums and artists, and turned up empty-handed. What could I do? The best option would be to keep everything on my computer and phone that MOG didn’t have, and then use the service for everything else.

That’s fragmentation, though. That’s not an awesome user experience.

By solving these problems for hardcore listeners, the new generation of cloud-based music services from Amazon, Google and Apple are finally closing the loop of digital music by making music listening a ubiquitously enjoyable experience, for casual and hardcore listeners alike.

For $24.99 per year (just over $2 a month), iTunes Match users will be able to access all of their music, whether its in Apple’s library or not, from any iOS 5 device or any computer with iTunes installed. Sure, the initial upload to Apple’s servers might take forever, especially if you have the maximum 25,000 songs like me, but that just comes with the territory.

As for Apple’s competitors, Amazon Cloud Drive is sort out of the picture, in the wake of WWDC. For what you can get with Apple for $25 per year, you’d have to pay Amazon $200 per year. (On the other hand, it is nice that they let you upload up to a terabyte. That is, if you’ve got a spare $1000 to spend every year.)

With a 20,000-song maximum, Google Music Beta remains pretty healthily in the game, though the company has yet to announce pricing. That service is free to use as long as its in beta, a place Google applications tend to linger for a long time.

Both Amazon and Google beat Apple in that they let you stream your content, while Apple only lets you redownload the content to your devices. In the end, users will most likely go to the service that best fits their mobile device (Android users to Google Music and iOS users iCloud).

In the end, however, what I'm trying to express is something bigger than competition between the giants. We can, and will, discuss that competition every day for the next year and beyond.

But what I'm most excited about right now is that people can finally listen to the music they love, in the highest possible quality, on the device they want to hear it from and when they want to hear it. It’s that simple, and it’s something that the most hardcore music lovers have salivated over for years.

And the day is finally coming.

Oh, and by the way. To all you cool cats waiting for lossless in the cloud: don’t worry, your day is coming too. Just a little later.