Cloud wars heat up some more

Last night I purchased a Bartok CD on amazon, and soon after I got the confirmation e-mail, I also got an e-mail that I'd purchased a Cloud Player-eligible CD (their words: it is Auto-Rip eligible). Meaning that the CD I bought could also be streamed to their Cloud Player (if only I had one!) and downloaded and added to iTunes, should I be so inclined.

So yes, I said. I'll use this amazon Cloud Player thingie and listen to some of this Bartok. And then, with the help of some more typically clunky amazon software I had to install, I downloaded the tracks and stuck them into iTunes.

When I returned to the Cloud Player, I was informed that they'd added streaming tracks from 108 other CDs I had bought from amazon, bringing my cloud player to 1,930 tracks.

Wow.

So naturally I installed the Cloud Player app on my iOS devices, yielding this interface on both of them:

Now I ALREADY have almost 10,000 tracks in my Google Music Player — those were tracks already in my iTunes. The advantage of that is streaming from anywhere and not having to have the iPod with you, etc.

And of course there are Google Music apps for iOS.

So I've got 12,000 songs up in that there cloud (2,000 of them duplicated), as well as 108 gigs of Dropbox space, 5 gigs of google drive, 10 gigs of Box.

And the first digital storage I ever bought was a box of 400K floppy discs in 1985. At $35, that's $3.50 per disc, or $8,960.00 per gigabyte. Think how rich I'd be with all this cloud storage in 1985.

Which I'd be accessing at 1200 baud.