Apple, Google, or Amazon: Which music locker should you use?
Dan Seitz 
So, Google Music has just rolled out, and now, you’ve got a choice: Apple, Amazon, or Google. Why are these three tech heavyweights slugging it out to offer you storage? It’s pretty simple: check the fine print of all three and you learn that if you buy music from their stores, it doesn’t count against your storage limit. They want you to buy from their stores.
Well, that’s just great, but how do these services stack up against each other?
Pros:
- Out of all of them, the easiest to use and the fastest to stream. Apple has a “just works” reputation for a reason, after all. Unfortunately, that’s because…
Cons:
- It only works with Apple devices. So if you don’t want an iPhone, an iPad, etc., you can go screw yourself.
- Stingy with the non-Apple storage: Apple only offers 5GB up front, and if you want twice that, they want twenty bucks a year for the privilege.
- Based around iTunes, which charges you a premium for the privilege of using its store.
Pros:
- Flexible in terms of platforms: pretty much anything you want to use either has an app or is easily accessible on the web.
- Streaming isn’t as quick as Apple, but fairly fast, regardless of what app or browser you’re using.
Cons:
- Again, only 5GB of storage, and it forces you to use their store. This isn’t as big of a deal: Amazon has the same selection and better pricing than iTunes. But it’s still annoying. Storage prices are at least cheaper than Apple’s…but it’s still grating to pay per year what you can buy physically in bulk.
- If you run something other than Mac or Windows, uploading your music is going to be a bit annoying and involved. A minor complaint, but we shouldn’t have to upload music to a storage drive and then move it to the Player to stream it back.
Pros:
- The one music focused service: no hard GB limits. Instead you can upload up to 20,000 songs, even if they’re all seventeen minutes long. This alone probably makes it the best option for hardcore music users. That’s a hard limit, though: you currently can’t buy any more storage.
- The most flexible in terms of desktops, as well; pretty much any OS more than five people use is supported in some form.
- The free selection does at least have a few artists you might have actually heard of.
Cons:
- Own an Apple product? No app for you! Not as annoying since you can use a browser to access your music, but still irksome.
- The music store is tied pretty heavily to Android, and you won’t be shopping there: the prices stink.
- The streaming, while quick on desktops, is slowest of all three on mobile devices. Realistically, you’re going to need to build playlists before you start listening.
The Verdict:
Google Music currently has the edge if for no other reason than it has the most storage. It’s not perfect, and you’ll probably be buying your music elsewhere, but you won’t be setting yourself up to give some company a fee for a pretty stingy amount of server space. Note to Apple: don’t hand me this crap about $100 a year for 50GB of storage. I can walk into a Best Buy and walk out with a terabyte for a hundred bucks.
I wound up going with Google Music on my personal computer, but buying my music from Amazon. If you’ve got iTunes, Google Music will play nice with it, so unless you’ve got a huge number of songs, right now it’s the way to go.
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