There was an interesting piece in PC World yesterday about an iPhone app called Cloud Music that allows you to store your music in Google Docs and stream it through your iPhone. Google Docs now allows users to store files of all types, so this app takes advantage of that fact. I’ve yet to play with it, but its an interesting response to the restrictions the Digital Rights Management puts on our music. Since users can share things in Google Docs, presumably they can also share the music in their digital collection, provided it is not protected by DRM measures they are not able to break.
A day before that the American Public Radio program Marketplace had an interesting segment on cloud computing and streaming music, but from a totally different angle. This time it is not the users that uploads and access their own files, but rather rather the users subscribe to a huge digital library of music and stream what they want. Most of these services also offer the opportunity for downloads for users who want to be able to take their music offline. The best known examples of this are Rhapsody.com and Lala.com, recently purchased and shut down by Apple. For a monthly fee you can listen to whatever you wan in the order you want. In essence it is a vast online digital library.
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