Music in the Cloud and the Constant Struggle

Remember Napster? Of course you do. It was a pioneer in it's day. That is of course before it was shut down by record companies after constant lawsuit battles over music piracy. Little did we know that it was just the tip of the iceberg for the online music revolution.


Since then, record companies have been going after used P2P clients, such as Gnutella and Morpheus. More recently, bit torrent sites have been the victim of attack. Now, don't get me wrong, if you just want to listen to music throughout your day, you can simply use Pandora, Grooveshark, or even create a playlist in YouTube if you don't mind spending the time looking for music with adequate quality. But, what if you just wanted to take your CD's and import them to an online location that you could access for your own personal use. There is nothing wrong with that, right? Not so much, according to a recent article I read in CNN.

Now the record industries are cracking down on companies such as Amazon and Google for their
cloud platform that allows music collections to be uploaded for personal use. The issue with that pertains to licensing agreements. Currently, word has it that Apple is negotiating license agreements for its iCloud service.

So... when will the constant struggle with record companies and online music services end? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.