One of the buzziest buzzwords in the tech world is “the cloud,” which refers to the practice of storing data remotely on networked servers. The metaphor may be blurry, but the idea’s simple: imagine yourself surrounded by an invisible nebula of data waiting to be accessed anywhere there’s an Internet connection, untethering you from the necessity of accessing your digital stuff via a specific device. Ten years on, the original iPod seems quaint with its five-gigabyte hard drive—and if digital music evolves the way most pundits are predicting, the whole idea of a music player that stores songs will follow suit.
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“The iPod gave us the idea that it would be really nice to carry all of our music around with us,” says Wired.com staff writer Ryan Singel. “Then the idea became, ‘Well, why should we all be carrying around all of this storage when we should be able to store it in one place and be able to access it from anywhere?’ It’s been a dream for people in Silicon Valley for some time.” Apple and Google haven’t publicly admitted that they’re planning to launch cloud-based music “locker” services, but rumors have been flying since Apple’s late-2009 acquisition of cloud-based streaming service Lala. Operations like mSpot and MP3tunes already offer something similar, though on a modest scale. Singel thinks the growth of fans’ music collections will push them to adopt one of these services. “It’s going to be a long time until you’re going to be able to hold 500 gigabytes or a terabyte of music. There’s weirdly a lot of people now who have 500 gigabytes of music.”
