I have more than 40GB of music I’ve ripped from my own CDs, purchased from a variety of locations (eMusic, Amazon, iTunes, some musicians' own websites) and in a few cases, yes, pirated. I listen to music at work, at home, in my car, and while running, and it’d be really nice to be able to take advantages of these new recently-announced cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple) to store and access my music from anywhere. But no company is forever. IBM and HP are shells of once-invulnerable corporations. Microsoft no longer innovates – they follow. None of these companies (as large as they are right now) will necessarily be around in twenty years, and there’s no guarantee that any of their services will be around in even five.
I’ve got a limited connection, which means uploading music to Amazon or Google would take something like a week. And my Android phone and Linux work computer will almost certainly not cooperate with Apple. So what’s a guy to do? For now, I plan on continuing to do things the old fashioned way. I’m not sure what kind of cloud service would make me feel comfortable spending the time uploading all of my music, but so far, it’s not any of these.