Freemor's Weblog

Music in the “Cloud”… Just say No

Since Amazon’s announcement of their “Cloud” based music service (“Cloud Drive”) the blog-o-sphere has been all a buzz with this hot new idea.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I think “Cloud” services are a trap and only good for the person that is offering the service.

This is no exception. Most of these “Cloud” services are charging something like $10/mo for unlimited streaming. It might sound good on the surface but once you think about it you realize that…

1. You’ll own nothing
2. Your ability to stream will depend on connectivity.. Your bill will not (you’ll be charged $10/mo whether you could stream or not.)
3. It is fairly trivial to set up your home computer to offer this same service for free and with all the music you already or will ever own.
4. These services will most likely insert advertising into the music either now.. Or in the future once people are hooked.
5. By connecting to their servers to stream your music these companies will be able to track all kinds of information about you.
   1. what you listen to
   2. where you listen from (device and location)
   3. How often you listen
   4. etc

Considering that with less than two hours work you could have exactly this for free why would anyone opt to pay $10/mo. to own nothing, be tracked and profiled, and advertised to. It is just a bad deal all around and people should just say no.

Note: In a future post (soon) I will detail how to set this up for yourself for next to nothing. Certainly for less then $120/year and your privacy