The biggest failing of Apple's iTunes Match is its 25,000-track limit. (It has others, to be sure.) Apple gives you no control over which tracks you store in the cloud, nor does it offer an option to pay more for additional storage. If you're a music fan with a large library, you have to perform a frustrating dance to create a secondary iTunes library, or simply remove items from your main library, to get under the limit.
And that's precisely why I also signed up for Amazon's Cloud Player Premium. For the same $25 a year, Amazon gives me ten times as much room—that's right, 250,000 tracks versus Apple's paltry 25,000. (Both services exclude tracks you've purchased from their respective online stores from that total.)
"Who needs more than 25,000 tracks?" you wonder. "That's only for pirates!" you say. I happen to have a music collection amassed over 25-plus years. I buy classical music compilations with hundreds of tracks for a few bucks. I get two free concert downloads a week with my Concert Vault subscription. I've purchased, traded, and/or downloaded thousands of live shows from places such as the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive and band websites.
Jonathan SeffSonos lets me listen to my nearly 40,000 Cloud Player songs.
In short, if you love music, these days you can easily have a lot of it—which makes the fact that Amazon's service is a mess that much more disappointing. Here are four problems the House of Bezos really needs to address to make its Web version of Cloud Player (available on any computer and the only option for Mac users) worth its salt.
Jonathan Seff
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