The way we listen to music has changed a lot over the decades. There was a time when everyone had vinyl records. Then came cassettes and CDs. Finally the revolution of MP3 players starting surfacing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Now, it’s all about the cloud and streaming. There are tons of streaming services out there and then there are even options like Google Play Music. With Google Play Music you can upload your entire music collection into the cloud for free and stream it from your phone or even PC.

Sounds good, but all that uploading takes a lot of bandwidth right? The good news is that Google Play Music is now bringing US users the ability to scan and match their existing library of music. What that means is that you don’t have to upload songs that are already found on Google’s online music library.

This saves you a lot of time uploading. That said, if they can’t find your song in their library, it will still upload like normal. Such a service is impressive, but even more impressive is that you can store up to 20,000 uploads at absolutely no cost to you.

What do you think of Google Play Music? Interested or not?

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Apple has reached agreements with three of the four major music labels and is close to reaching terms with the fourth. Since Apple has probably paid a hefty sum for the cloud music licenses, it’s unclear how much of an effect this will have on consumers. One possibility is that the cloud-streaming service will be bundled into the MobileMe subscription service that costs $99 a year. Amazon’s Cloud Drive comes free with 5 GB of storage, and offers upgrades that include 20 GB for $20 a year. Google’s Music Beta will offer users the ability to store up to 20,000 songs without charge. Price-wise, there’s not much of a competition, but Amazon and Google haven’t been able to reach agreements with any labels.

After Amazon revealed their Cloud Drive, which allows users to upload their entire collections onto the company’s servers, the process forced Amazon to store multiple copies of the same songs. The labels were angered that Amazon stored the songs on their servers without paying the labels any extra fees. Google negotiated with the music labels for more than a year to create their cloud music service, then launched an unlicensed service when agreements didn’t go through. The music industry’s concern was that search results in Google and YouTube often point to pirated music. It seems the record companies won’t cease fighting cloud services until every last penny is taken from the pocket of the consumer and placed in the cold, dead hands of the record executives. With Apple willing to pay out the record companies, we’ll see if consumers will be free from the threats of the labels or if they will have to pay a big price for Apple’s cloud.

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