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Back in the day -- and we're talking way back -- to listen to music you had very few choices. It really just boiled down to two: Find someone who could sing or play music or learn to do so yourself. Skip ahead a few centuries to the invention of the radio. With car radios and portable transistor radios, you had access to music on the go without having to hire your own personal musician. But your choices weren't unlimited -- you had to listen to whatever the radio station was playing. A few decades later, magnetic storage was the way to go. You could get a cassette tape and listen to music on a portable player. But storage space per cassette was limited and the magnetic storage would degrade over time. Optical storage solved some problems, but you still had limits to the amount of music you could cram onto a single compact disc, and carrying around a portable player wasn't always easy.
And if your CD player moved around too much, the laser inside it could skip bits of the music tracks. Now you could create a digital library of music and sync it to a portable device that could potentially hold hundreds of hours of songs. Players with large hard drive space could hold so much music that the battery would run out before you could listen to them all. But even this space had limitations, and porting music from one device to another wasn't always easy. Now, we have cloud music services that promise to give us unprecedented access to music. Many of them have interfaces that allow you to access music across a wide variety of devices, including computers, MP3 players, smartphones, set-top boxes and video game consoles. You can create an enormous music library and enjoy it in more places than ever before. These are cloud services -- they utilize computer servers connected to the Internet to let you access information.
But what makes music cloud services tick and what are the limitations? The first is similar to a radio station. You create a profile with the service and build up a music library based on your preferences. The service then streams music over the Internet to you. If you have a slow or unreliable connection to the Internet you may not be able to use these services all the time. Some, like Pandora Radio, allow you to create stations based on a specific artist or song. You aren't guaranteed to hear that artist or song every time you use the service. Instead, you'll hear music that Pandora Radio matches against your preferences. As you listen, you approve or turn down songs that play on your stations and Pandora Radio adjusts the playlist to suit your tastes. With this model of music cloud service, you'll still encounter new music. There are many services that work like Pandora Radio, using various algorithms to match your preferences to music the services have licensed from music studios.
Another approach to the radio station model gives you a little more control over what's in your library. Services like Spotify allow you to search for specific songs and add them to playlists. Whenever you connect to your account, you can listen to your playlists, change the play order of songs and add or delete music from your library. You might not discover as much new music this way, but you'll be able to control your listening experience. Because this model also depends on music licenses, your choices won't be unlimited. If a studio hasn't licensed particular music to the service, you won't find it in the database. These services store your music remotely. You may have to upload your own music to the service, which can take a lot of time if you have a large library or a slow Internet connection. The service acts like an external hard drive.
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