We all know that cloud storage has become as much an everyday part of our existence on the Internet as cell phones have elsewhere in our lives.
I believe that cloud storage as it relates to music is about to make a huge leap in our day to day activities as it relates to two of the most popular cloud storage solutions SkyDrive and Dropbox.
Two weeks ago Liveside reported that they had found some code in the SkyDrive website that gives a direct indication that there is development occurring to create a music player on the service. Currently you can store WMA and MP3 files on SkyDrive but they can not be played from the site and must be downloaded.
Then this week one of their main competitors, Dropbox as reported by Tech Crunch, purchased Audiogalaxy. Audiogalaxy is a service that allows users to store their music in the cloud and stream it to any device.
Whether Dropbox is following the indications from SkyDrive or not we do not know but music being stored in the cloud and having the capability to be streamed to your devices is about to become reality on these two services.
Now lets focus on the SkyDrive side of things in relation to this future capability. To do this I must bring up Xbox Music.
Xbox Music is a built in part of the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems through the Music App. One of its features, albeit very rough at this point, is the capability to match your locally stored music and provide you the ability to stream that music out of the cloud. Now your copy of the music is not uploaded to the cloud it is simply matched against an equivalent copy stored in the Xbox Music Service. With that music matched you can then stream that music to another Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 device or even your Xbox 360 console.
The nice thing about the Xbox Music Service is those songs that are matched for you are stored on Microsoft servers and streamed from there. There is no cost against your SkyDrive cloud storage for that.
I am wondering if that is about to change.
If SkyDrive gets the capability to play and stream music from that cloud storage is it not possible that our matched music could be loaded onto our SkyDrive under a music folder or something similar instead of being stored on Microsoft’s own servers? At that point the storage penalty moves to our SkyDrive allotment although if Microsoft wanted to do something similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player they could allow any music purchased to not count against the storage allotment and then allow us to upload whatever other music we want to have stored there.
Now add this to your thought process – with the new SkyDrive App for Xbox 360 could we also be looking at the possibility of listening to our music via that app instead of paying a subscription on the console for Xbox Music? Right now you can easily browse and view photos and videos. Music seems like a logical next step there as well.
There is no doubt that we are about to go through a significant change in how we access our music across multiple screens with the cloud being the storage medium and middle man in the whole setup.
It continues to be an exciting time with all these things moving forward in leaps and bounds.
What are your thoughts about these possibilities?
