Amazon Cloud Drive
Probably the biggest draw back of the
Amazon service is the slow setup. When we tested it, the service took some patience and persistence to get going after several crashes. After that comes hours upon hours, possibly several days, of uploading your music library. Once your music is in there, playlists you once had will be gone and there's no way to rate any of your songs in your library. If you aren't an avid Amazon purchaser, holding a large music library in
Cloud Drive is going to cost you a hefty amount. Users are also unable to edit any song metadata.
Google Music Beta
While we were generally happy with Music Beta's performance, Google has some big kinks to work out. With this kind of service, the slow upload time is going to be a pain, but it's pretty unavoidable. However,
Google needs to give users more control over which songs get uploaded into the cloud, instead of a simple two-option choice between everything in the iTunes folder or everything in another folder. There is no way to purchase any music through Music Beta (though you can choose to have new iTunes purchases automatically uploaded), which will be a drawback for some users. A forthcoming price tag (unless we're lucky) could also be a drawback.
Apple iCloud
The biggest evident drawback of
iCloud, or what we know about it, is that there won't be any access from the Web. As far as we know, users won't be able to access their libraries of songs by simply opening up a browser window. This will no doubt alienate users who don't use all Apple devices, but perhaps that's part of Steve Jobs' strategy.
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