I was reading this article on NPR today, regarding their music writer deleting his entire iTunes library of 25,000 songs (after backing it up) in favour of Apple’s iTunes Match service.  If you haven’t played with iCloud yet, the Match part of it allows you to host your iTunes collection on Apple’s cloud servers instead of your own computer.  This will, of course, free up space and allow your library and anything new you add to it to be available to any of your Apple devices, anywhere you have a connection to the internet.  It also doesn’t matter if say you only purchased some of the songs in your library on iTunes and the rest you “acquired” from different sources, as those will be uploaded too, and any low quality tracks will be automatically turned into relatively good quality 256k AAC’s (this also applies to any high quality tracks, they will be downgraded to 256k AAC’s).  This is a pretty big step in terms of how we think about our media and ownership of it, similar to the step I took around ten years ago when I decided to only have a digital music library and stopped buying CD’s, I’m not sure I’m ready to take this step though, and here is why.

The first and most obvious reason is if you don’t have access to the internet through wifi or 3G and up network speeds, you don’t have access to your music. I’m really attached to my music, I won’t lie, I doubt I could go a day without it. So for example say you fly on certain airlines that don’t have wifi on planes.  What you would have to do there is download the playlists from the cloud, so you’re re-downloading your own music, like syncing an iPod ahead of time and listen to them that way. If you happen to forget to do that though, its going to be a long flight. Also if you happen to venture outside of your home area and start to roam, roaming data charges are ri-dic-u-lous. A couple weeks back when I was in Las Vegas, before I even got there when I landed in detroit and turned my phone on, I had even received two text messages from my own carrier telling me that I was now roaming and asking me to commit to a roaming plan on the spot, so even they know roaming is expensive.

The second reason I’m a bit shy to trust my entire digital library to the internet is that nothing is infallible. I learned this lesson from the last windows based laptop I owned as well as the last windows based PC I owned, both went up in smoke, literally.  Though the possibility that I may just be a magnet for technological suicide, still, we have seen many large company’s sites overflown and downed by various groups over the internet during the last year, and if that were to happen to even part of one of Apple’s server farms that support iCloud, the potential for data loss would be rather large. I say that because iTunes Match isn’t the only thing you can sync (store) in the cloud, there’s contacts, pictures, notes, your calendar, doc’s and data, etc. If I were to upload my music collection to iTunes Match and delete it from my laptop, I would also back it up as Mr. Boilen did in the NPR article in case one day 14,000 songs disappeared from Apple’s servers.

Apple has gone to great lengths to advertise the usefulness of the cloud, the convenience of it and that it may indeed be infallible. They have even made the icon look like a cloud etched out of aluminum so that when you see it, you want to believe its similar to or as strong as your other Apple devices. Here is the man himself introducing the service nearly a year ago:

$25 a year, that is low, of course that is just for the use of the service which brings me to my third point. As many have learned through the use of services like Netflix or any other service which streams media from the internet to your computer/tv, this surprisingly (for early Netflix customers) uses data and it uses a lot of data. Netflix has recently fixed this problem (to a point) by using a more efficient compression on their files. According to Netflix, where 30 hours of streaming HD content used to use 31GB’s of data, it now uses 9GB’s. So you’re thinking “well that solves that” but that’s visual media and in that area, 30 hours is a pretty decent amount to use in a comparison, but think how much you listen to your music in a day. When you get up, on the way to work, at work, during lunch, on the way home from work, at the gym, at home, etc. Even if you only listen to your music in half of those instances, you’ll most likely spend around 3 hours a day listening to your library of songs. If we say a song is around 6mb’s and one hour of streaming from your library is around 150mb-200mb’s worth of data, that means you’re clocking in at a very generalized approximated 500mb’s per day or 3.5gb’s per week. That may not sound like a lot for a home internet plan, but it is over half of the highest data plan you can get on a cellphone in Canada (6gb/$30mth) and that is assuming that you’re only listening to music, and that you’re only doing this 3 hours per day. Plus it would be good to note how much time you spend listening to your music on your home internet and how much time you spend listening to it on say, an iPhone, when you don’t have access to wifi.

The fourth and final issue I have with the service is this, its essentially a free pass on anything you’ve pirated, I mean “acquired”, since anything you upload that is not in the iTunes library, is automatically remastered into legit DRM-free AAC’s. Good for you? Probably. How Apple got this past the music companies? I have no idea. That worries me because as I discussed at the end of the article I wrote on the rise and fall of MTV, the record companies are aggressively (slowly) taking back control of their media. As much as I love Apple and their products, if they can remotely delete an app off of an iPhone if they decide it no longer meets their TOS, its probably much easier to delete the songs in your uploaded library that don’t match the iTunes library. This would only happen if in the future one or two or all of the record companies get together and brought a lawsuit against Apple, and they won, but it is a possibility. We saw it happen with the original Napster and more recently Limewire.

So, to sum this up, would I trust my music to the cloud? Not yet, I’m going to give it another year or version. There is a reason it is commonly said that you should never buy the first of anything, the bugs are still being worked out. I do trust Apple to a certain extent and I trust that the service is a revolutionary idea, however much like when I decided to switch over from tapes to CD’s, and CD’s to MP3′s its a rather large step. Actually it’s the largest step if you understand that this time you’re giving up control completely, and putting your cherished music library in the hands of a cloud.

Media Sources: youtube, Cnet, Apple, techdigest