Music is still a huge - and growing - part of the Web today. This year, we watched a number of trends unfold in the digital music space. Picking the five most significant was no easy task, but we manage to narrow it down. This space is still evolving, and we can only imagine how it will look another decade from now.

Buzz about "the cloud" in general has been building up for a few years now, but 2011 was the year that we saw our music collections begin to make their way toward Web-based repositories. First, there was the rise of all-you-can-stream music services like Rdio and Mog. That particular space was lit afire by the July U.S. launch of Spotify, which did not go unnoticed by its competitors, most of whom dropped their entry level price tags down to zero in order to keep up.

With these services, consumers move from playing MP3s on their hard drives to streaming tracks from the cloud, whether at their desktop or from their smartphones and tablets. In the case of Spotify, that cloud-based library of millions of tracks can even be merged with one's own local collection, providing a theoretically infinite library of music.

This year, we also saw the emergence of cloud music lockers. This model is a bit different from the streaming services in that it takes a person's existing collection and allows them to store it online for playback from any connected device. Amazon launched their Cloud Drive in late March, having already operated their own MP3 store for some time. The service allows music fans to upload and store their collections to Amazon's servers for streaming later.

Amazon's model is quite similar to the one offered by Google about eight months later when it publicly launched Google Music. The new initiative, which was first unveiled at Google I/O in May, took the cloud music locker concept the company originally built and added a digital music store on top of it, putting the service in direct competition with Amazon Cloud Drive.

Not to be left out of the cloud music game, Apple unveiled iTunes Match alongside iOS 5 and iCloud in June. Ten years after the company began revolutionizing digital music with the iPod, Apple decided to place a big bet on the idea that the cloud is where people will store their ever-expanding music collection in the future. Like Amazon and Google's solutions, iTunes Match enables access to one's collection across devices. Crucially, Apple's offering does not support streaming, but rather requires listeners to download tracks locally.

2. Online Music Gets More Social (or Annoying)

For as long as there have been Web music services, there have been attempts to bolt on social networking features. Some, like the Ping feature in iTunes, have fallen flat. Pandora has managed to become a relatively successful service without baking in very many social features at all. By comparison, Last.fm and Rdio are way more social.

As popular as it is in Europe and now the U.S., Spotify never had any ground-breaking social features of its own; Just the ability to share playlists and tracks over Twitter and Facebook and plug into other services like Last.fm. That all changed at the f8 developer conference in September when Spotify became one of a number of music services to get tight integration with Facebook.

Rather than try and take on Google, Amazon and Apple and smaller players in the music space, Facebook decided to partner with the likes of Mog, Rdio and Spotify to advance it's so-called "frictionless sharing" philosophy. By linking their Facebook account with any one of these services, users can automatically share every single track they listen to with their Facebook friends and start amassing aggregate monthly data about their listening habits on their Facebook profile.

The partnership has helped fuel enormous growth for Spotify and delighted some users, but not everybody is thrilled with the concept. CNet's Molly Wood wrote a biting critique of Facebook's new approach to sharing, and our own Marshall Kirkpatrick weighed in with a thoughtful critical analysis. ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus had some concerns about it as well, but thinks Facebook is simply redefining sharing, rather than flat-out ruining it. Scott M. Fulton III reminded everybody that these features require users to opt-in, so avoiding the discomfort is as easy as doing nothing. If you've already connected Facebook and Spotify, but have had a change of heart, you can always turn the integration off.

Love it or hate the execution of it, Facebook's integration with music services is just the beginning of a more social experience when it comes to listening to and discovering music online.

3. Recommendation Evolves: Man vs. Machine

Digital music recommendation engines are nothing new. Pandora and Last.fm have provided listeners with algorithmically-determined suggestions for years. In 2011, as new music services cropped up left and right and the selection of available music continued to expand, listeners still found themselves with a thirst for solid recommendations for what to listen to next. Pandora, which filed for a $100 million IPO in February, continued to serve as an attractive Web radio option, with its powerful recommendation engine fueled by the Music Genome Project.

Even though it's overshadowed by the newer, all-you-can-stream music services, Last.fm still boasts a robust community and its music recommendation algorithm is often used by other apps (including Spotify), from which users can "scrobble" their music, creating a detailed profile of listening habits that can be used to discover similar artists.

A music recommendation system many have used, often without knowing it, is The Echo Nest. Their platform powers dozens of music apps with over 5 billion data points about music and various associations between different artists, albums and songs. To date, the Echo Nest Platform has indexed over 30 million songs, far more than Pandora.

As powerful as these machine-driven recommendation engines can be, there's still something to be said for human curation. For evidence of this, look no further than the popularity of apps like Shuffler.fm, a service that turns human-edited music blogs across the Internet into dynamic, genre-based radio stations. It takes a step away from the algorithm in favor of tastemakers, kind of like in the old days. Shufflr.fm received heaps of praise from the tech press over the summer and recently launched its iPad app, making unique music discovery experience portable.

4. Group Listening: Turntable.fm and Beyond

The value of this human touch in digital music curation was also seen in the rise of group-listening apps in 2011. The biggest and most buzz-worthy was Turntable.fm.

When the creators of mobile barcode scanning app Stickybits decide to pivot, as they say, to an entirely new type of mobile application, they didn't expect it to blow up quite the way it did. Turntable.fm, their virtual group-listening and DJ'ing Web app, became wildly popular and sparked several copycat sites, including one that was a near total rip-off of the original.

Turntable.fm allows users to get together in a virtual room and take turns playing DJ for one another, using music stored on their computer's hard drive. In September, the company brought this group listening experience to the mobile space when it launched an app for iPhone and iPad.

5. Music Creation Goes Mobile

It wasn't just music consumption that got a big boost in 2011. Creating it is now easier than ever, thanks to a growing array of digital tools.

Mobile apps geared toward creating music started appearing shortly after the launch of the iTunes App Store in 2008. As platforms like iOS and Android have grown more capable, so too have these kinds of applications. There's no shortage of apps that synthesize real instruments, and even ones that let you record your own samples, make beats and create songs from scratch.

In 2011, we saw Apple roll several of these concepts into one when it launched Garage Band for iPad, and then scaled it down for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It's not the first music recording and sequencing mobile app to appear, but for the price tag ($4.99), it's easily the most powerful. Garage Band for iOS includes dozens of synthesized instruments, which can often be pretty expensive when purchased as stand-alone apps. It also has several "smart" instruments for the less musically inclined.

Like its desktop counterpart, the core function of this app is to record and sequence multiple tracks of music. Using external accessories, one can even record vocals and guitars. Garage Band for iOS and apps like it provide an early glimpse of what's possible on tablets and smartphones, two categories of devices that are still relatively young.

It was a good year for SoundCloud, a social audio-hosting site that has grown quite popular among amateur and professional musicians alike. Big labels and known acts are using SoundCloud to post and promote music, while smaller artists and laptop hobbyists are finding audiences there as well. Think of it as sort of a YouTube for audio.

Like so many other popular Web services, SoundCloud pushed further into the mobile space this year, launching apps for iPhone, Android and iPad, among others. Users can not only use the service's mobile apps to stream and comment on music, but they can also record and post their own tracks right from the app.

ST Holdings, a music distributor that represents over 200 labels, recently asked those labels if they would like to keep their catalogues on services like Spotify and Rdio. Four of them said yes. So, citing a recent survey showing that streaming services hurt music sales, ST Holdings pulled its music from Spotify, Rdio, Napster and Simfy.

200 Music Labels Sounds Like a Big Loss...

The ST Holdings labels weren't the first to pull out of the digital streaming business. A number of small, independent labels have done so and recently bigger acts like Coldplay have declined to make new material available on Spotify.

While 200 music labels sounds like a lot of content, it's worth noting that these are also relatively small labels, most of which specialize in various sub-genres of electronic music. There's very little risk of any of the major labels dropping Spotify, event if a few big name artists with enough clout may follow Coldplay's lead.

In addition to the four (okay, three) major labels, Spotify and its competitors still have most of the bigger independent labels, including more than 12,000 represented by Merlin. For the time being, the majority of popular artists, both mainstream and indie, are available on Spotify.

You Can Still Get Any Music You Want and Put it in Spotify

When Spotify finally launched in the U.S. this summer, I put it through its paces for about 48 hours, and then signed up for the premium account, dropping Rdio in the process. As much as I liked Rdio (and still miss its UI sometimes), one of the killer features of Spotify had for me was its ability to merge my locally-stored music files with its giant library in the cloud.

The truth is, I don't expect every artist on the planet to be included in Spotify's library. As long as a sizable (and growing) selection of artists is there for me to stream, I'm perfectly content acquiring other music directly, especially from local artists who may not be signed to even a tiny label.

When I do, I can download those files to my laptop and listen to them from the same desktop client I use for streaming. When I sync my iPhone and iPad with Spotify, that music is then transferred to those device and is available to me when I'm on the go.

The Music Industry is Still in Transition

Ten years after the demise of Napster, the music industry is still very much in transition. What will have emerged another decade from now is going to look different from what we know today and the shift probably isn't done being disruptive.

To be sure, the concerns artists have over the low payments offered by all-you-can-stream model are perfectly legitimate. It's undeniable that direct downloads and even physical music format sales generate more revenue than services like Rdio and Spotify. However, Spotify has only been live in the U.S. for four months and is still growing. As that happens, its competitors are adapting. In time, the model should become more profitable for arists Both Apple and Google have also stepped up their game in the digital music space recently.

Just as I, as a consumer, have multiple ways to legally acquire music, artists have several choices when it comes to selling and distributing it in this new digital ecosystem. Streaming services are one of them. iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store are others. As of last week, artists can now upload their own music directly to Google Music and set their own prices. Similarly, tracks can be sold via Bandcamp.

Even with these options, it's possible that the recording and distribution of music may not forever be as lucrative as it is today. Tomorrow's model may include a hybrid from music sales, merchandise, performances and perhaps other factors that have yet to fully emerge.

It's been an eventful week for online music, with the launch of Apple's iTunes Match and the public unveiling of Google Music (along with a new MP3 store in the Android Market). This follows on from continued innovation in the music streaming market, in particular the integration of Spotify and similar services into Facebook. It's great to see so much action in the online music space. But... there are some major problems with these services. Here are the top three issues, in my opinion.

The three biggest product updates in online music over the past month all have one thing in common: most of the world cannot use these products. Facebook's integration of Spotify and other streaming services; Apple's iTunes Match; Google Music (at least when it comes to the new MP3 store, which is a big part of the appeal for Google Music).

With iTunes Match, Google's new MP3 store and Amazon's MP3 store, you have to be a resident of the U.S. in order to use them. As for the streaming services, they too have limited reach. Spotify for example is only available in certain European countries and in the USA. This means that Facebook's integration of streaming music services isn't available to a large proportion of its 800 million user base. To put some numbers around that, more than 75% of Facebook users live outside of the USA. That's 600 million people, most of whom probably cannot access the streaming music features.

This frustrating state of affairs is of course due to the music industry. Record labels are trying desperately to hold onto the reins of power with licensing terms that are outdated and differ across countries. The whole point of the World Wide Web is to give people across the entire world equal opportunities to create and consume content. Yet a large percentage of the Web is denied the chance to use these wonderful new online music services.

OK, this is a first world problem and certainly not something to do a Live Aid about. All I'm saying is that I don't live in the U.S. and I'm extremely frustrated that I cannot use most of the best online music services.

2. Inconsistent User Experience

If you're fortunate enough to be able to use these services in the first place, you'll have noticed many flaws in the user experience.

Facebook's integration of Spotify and other streaming music services, labeled frictionless sharing, posts every single song you listen to onto your Facebook news feed. While it requires the user to turn this functionality on, the problem is in the lack of granular control. Once you turn it on, there's no way you can tell Facebook: just publish the songs that make me look cool to my friends. Or: don't post that I'm listening to Justin Bieber. It posts everything, like it or not.

Google Music has some user experience oddities too, which Danny Sullivan outlined in full. He also pointed out similar issues with iTunes and Spotify. In my own limited testing of Google Music (through a VPN) I found it odd that I could not share music to Google+ that I had uploaded myself. Yet I could share a song I'd gotten through the Android Market.

Then consider the differences in sharing functionality in Facebook and Google+. In Facebook the music sharing is automatic and all-encompassing. In Google+, it's restricted and a manual process. Two opposite ends of the sharing spectrum - and plenty of differences in-between, among Facebook, Google+ and many other sharing services.

In some ways this is just what you get with intense competition, but on the other hand I hope best practices evolve over time for music sharing. So that I can share any song I want to, in roughly the same manner, across any social network.

3. Your Music Is All Over The Place

Related to the user experience problem is the fact that one's music is becoming difficult to manage, because there are so many different ways to listen to and/or buy music (again, assuming you even have access to the services).

Say I download a song from the Android Store; it now lives in my Google Music app. Sure I can sync it to iTunes or wherever I like. But it requires manual set-up or action. You'll quickly lose track of where all of your music is.

Or say that I discover a brilliant new album on Spotify. I listen to it a few times, then I move on to other music. But I never bought that album, so I don't own it. That's all well and good, but if I use iTunes as my primary music store then I don't have that album there. Sure I can just buy it, but I've already listened to it a few times and I may not listen to it again for months or even years. Besides, if I've stumped up for a monthly subscription to Spotify then I may not feel inclined to shell out more money for that particular album. My point is: some of your music now lives in a local app like iTunes, some is on a service like Spotify, some you may have discovered on Google+, and so on. It's all over the place and you're relying on a bunch of apps and services now.

While sync services like iTunes Match help with some of this (particularly listening to your music across devices), it's going to be a challenge to figure out where your music should 'live' and what music you still want to 'own'. This isn't as big of a problem as the above two issues, but it's still something that Apple, Google and co should help their users manage.

Those are my current three gripes with the online music services. The biggest for me is the geographic restrictions. What's your main beef - if any - with this new wave of online music services?

Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They've partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn't sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.

The new music store, which is now live in the Android Market, already has 8 million songs in it, and that number will rise to 13 million in the coming weeks. Still, that puts it about 7 million songs behind iTunes, which has deals in with all four major labels, most indie labels, and even convinced The Beatles to get on board two years ago. That said, the iTunes Store has been live since 2003 and it's had all that time to build up its catalog. For only being live less than hour, Google Music is catching up to the likes of Apple and Amazon pretty fast.

Google Throws in a Few Perks

To help draw listeners in, Google is offering high-quality audio, free storage, some unique social features and artist exclusivity.

As expected, Google Music is integrated with Google+, the young social network that is increasingly at the heart of Google's product strategy. When users share music on Google+, those tracks are available to their friends for free for up to one listen. This is also true of entire albums shared on Google+.

To make the product more appealing at launch, Google named several artists that are releasing new material exclusively Google Music. The new studio album by rapper Busta Rhymes is being released exclusively on Google Music, and several other artists, such as Pearl Jam and the Rolling Stones, are releasing exclusive live alums through the new service. Notably, another artist on the list is Coldplay, who recently pulled their catalog from Spotify over concerns about low royalty payments.

Devoted users of Apple products may still be lured by iTunes Match, which doesn't require a lengthy bulk file upload. Still, for the price (free), Google Music can probably convince a lot of people to sit and wait for their files to transfer.

A Leg Up For Independent Artists

Although Google has partnered with most of the major labels, it's hard to miss that part of what they're launching could serve to further undermine the importance of record labels and other twentieth century relics of the music industry.

Through its Artist Hub, Google Music is giving artists tools to market themselves and sell their music directly to fans. For a one-time fee of $25, any artist can set up a profile, upload an unlimited amount of their music, manage photos and even set their own prices.

If Google Music takes off, this may well prove to be a viable source of revenue for emerging artists, many of whom are wary of the low royalty payments offered by streaming services like Rdio and Spotify. Artists can also sell tracks directly through YouTube, which is already a prominent source for music discovery.

Just as with signed artists, independent artists who upload their music to Google's storefront will get a 70% cut of all revenue generated by MP3 sales.

You can also now purchase music from the Android Market. It's available in high-quality, 320kbps MP3 format, and you get a 90-second preview before you buy in the store. But to drive more sharing and purchases, the service is integrated with Google+. Music that's shared to Google+ can be played back in its entirety by anyone in your circles.

Facebook is a social network bigger than most countries, so Spotify's streaming-only music business has a scale advantage. But Google Music offers something no other social music service does: full-length, high-quality playback for all your friends on Google+. Google Music is a compelling offering, giving users a 20,000-song streaming locker for free, and the Android Market music store has lots of discovery features. Would a great music service like this drive you to use Google+ more?

There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.

Assuming you want to use a cloud service to archive or backup your music collection (and at this point in the evolution of digital music, you probably do), let's check out the three main services.

I'm a big music fan and probably fairly typical in terms of my requirements for online archiving, so I'll use myself as a use case.

Why Do I Need an Online Archive For My Music?

Like tens of millions of people, I use iTunes to manage my digital music collection. I typically sync the songs in my iTunes to my iPod, which I take on walks or plug into the stereo in my lounge.

I currently have about 12,500 songs stored on iTunes; and I haven't even transferred a good portion of my CD collection to iTunes. I have a 148 GB 2008 model iPod, which has about 32 GB free currently. About 78.5 GB is taken up by music (note: the total file size for you will depend on the quality of digital file you choose, the length of the songs, and so on).

So my current iPod, over 3 years old, is still adequate for my digital music storage needs.

However neither my iPhone (13.7 GB) or iPad (58.1 GB) has enough storage to fit all of my iTunes music. So that's a good use case right there for me to use a cloud service for my music: it would enable me to listen to my music on iPhone or iPad, even if I hadn't synced it to those devices.

Having an online archive would also motivate me to transfer the rest of my CD collection into iTunes, a manual task that I've been avoiding for years. After I do that, I'd be able to listen to anything in my music collection, whatever device I'm on. That seems like a good deal to me.

The 3 Main Cloud Lockers

Just today, Apple launched iTunes Match (currently only available to U.S. users). Apple's online storage service iCloud is the backend. iTunes Match offers iTunes users the ability to sync their entire music library across devices. It does this by "matching" each song with a high quality version stored on Apple's servers, which saves you having to upload those songs. However any songs which Apple doesn't have can be uploaded. Currently Apple has imposed a limit of 25,000 songs (not including songs purchased from the iTunes Store). If you have more than that, you are currently prevented from using the service at all!

But wait, you can almost guarantee these days that anything Apple releases will be matched by a lower cost Amazon offering. Sure enough, Amazon has a "limited time offer" of unlimited music storage on its Cloud Drive for $20 per year. That offer also comes with 20 GB of non-music storage. There is some fine print as to what music is eligible, but it looks like most of my music collection would qualify.

Finally, there is Google Music. It's currently in beta and only available to U.S. users. Google Music offers storage of up to 20,000 songs for free, during the beta period. Pricing hasn't been announced yet for premium offerings, but it will no doubt be very competitive with Apple and Amazon. Google is also currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music.

Which Service Should You Use?

Each of Apple, Amazon and Google is offering a pretty amazing deal for storing your digital music. From zero to $25 per year, the pricing is almost irrelevant considering how much storage you get. If you have a decent music collection, you're talking about archiving 50 GB worth of music at the least.

There are tradeoffs with each of the three services. With Amazon or Google, you need to upload all of your music - which will likely be a big bandwidth and time hog. Apple's iTunes Match gets around that pain point by "matching" songs you have with songs on its servers. That's a very compelling advantage to iTunes Match.

Some people, however, may balk at submitting to Apple's control for yet another part of their digital life. So Amazon or Google may be a better bet for them.

For my purposes, with 12,500 songs currently in my iTunes and a good portion of them likely to be on Apple's servers, iTunes Match is a great cloud solution for me. At least it will be when it becomes available outside of the USA.

Let us know which one of these three you'll use - and why. Or perhaps you want to steer clear of the big companies and go with an indie solution. We're all ears in the comments...

Lead photo adapted from Flickr user notsogoodphotography and cat photo by Elmo Keep.

Apple recently pulled a third party app that let users stream music from their Amazon cloud locker, reportedly due to legal concerns.

Where's iTunes Match?

iTunes Match, Apple's somewhat different answer to Google and Amazon's cloud lockers, was unveiled by Steve Jobs alongside iOS 5 in June, but the service has yet to be activated. When iOS 5 was launched last month, Apple said we should expect to see iTunes Match by the end of October, a deadline that has obviously passed now that November is here.

For iOS users who have grown impatient, it looks like trying one of Apple's competitors isn't an option for now. This is one of the limitations of this still-emerging space. Services like Google Music and iTunes Match ostensibly allow people to free their music from the confines of local storage and listen to them from any Internet-connected device. Yet, as this incident illustrates, such freedom comes with its limitations.

That's about to change, according to a report from the New York Times. Google is currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music. The move would put Google in more direct competition with Amazon and Apple, the latter of which is the market leader in digital music sales.

The news comes just as Apple is putting the finishing touches on iTunes Match, a cloud-based music storage service that can be purchased as an add-on to the company's popular digital music ecosystem. Rather than require users to upload every song they purchase (as Google and Amazon do), iTunes Match will scan one's local collection of music and find each song in Apple's massive library of music. Those tracks are then made available to the user from any Apple device.

One thing Apple has that Google doesn't is dominance in the personal music player hardware market. Yes, Google has smartphones and tablets, but Apple has smartphones, tablets and iPods. It remains unknown at this point whether Google will develop iOS apps for Google Music. Since it's selling content, Google may opt to forgo Apple's revenue-sharing requirements and create an HTML5 Web app, much like Amazon did with Kindle Cloud Reader. For now, Google Music is only available on Android devices and via the desktop.

Resistance From Music Labels

Google reportedly had a hard time shoring up deals with music labels ahead of the initial launch of Google Music, so they launched it anyway. Traditional content owners have often been wary of Google, who has gained a reputation among some legacy media organizations as being too soft on piracy. The company has extended a few olive branches recently, making public efforts to discourage copyright infringement and buttering up media executives.

For its part, Apple has secured the licensing rights necessary to make iTunes Match possible, and it obviously already has agreements in place with major music labels that enable it to sell digital music from the iTunes Store.

Google has an uphill battle to fight if it expects to take on Apple in this space. Amazon might provide a fairer fight. Either way, Google is hoping to bolt additional revenue streams onto its business model, which remains heavily bolstered by the money it makes search advertising.

Google Music is Cloud Storage for Songs

Google Music was announced at the Google I/O conference in May, and launched into beta. Initially, only I/O attendees were invited to join.

The service is similar to Amazon's "Cloud Drive," in that it also offers a place for users to store their music files "in the cloud" - the cloud in this case being Google's servers. But unlike Cloud Drive, there's no accompanying music store where you can purchase more tracks to fill your collection.

Still, for those with extensive music collections of their own, Google Music is a decent enough way to access those files from any Android mobile device, without worrying about storage limitations. The tracks stream over the network when played. Offline access is available too, if you've explicitly made select music available for offline listening.

Be Warned: You'll Need Some Time!

The one big drawback to using Google's service, is the time it takes to upload your files. For those who have collections that number in the 10's of Gigs, you'll have to start the upload process, then walk away for a cup of coffee…lunch, then dinner, a good night's sleep, breakfast, and maybe more.

Uploading is painful because Google Music doesn't have the necessary legal permission to do "music matching," a feature that would check your track lists against Google's own music collection. This is what Apple is offering with its forthcoming iCloud service: iTunes in the cloud. For paying customers ($25/year), iTunes will scan your music and match it to the 18 million songs it has in the iTunes Music store and make those available from all your Apple devices. It's a much easier entry point for cloud music, we would say. But iCloud is not Android-friendly. And Google Music is not Apple-friendly, except for some clunky workarounds.

At least once the collection is (finally) online, using the Google Music app is easy. It's a simple download for your Android device.

And for more information on the differences between Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, check out our earlier review here.

How to Get Invites

If you know someone who's a current Google Music user, now's the time to ask for an invite. After logging into the service, the orange bar at the top of the screen should read "Invite a friend: 2 remaining." Just click the link to hand them out.

Why so few invites? Probably to limit the impact on the still-beta service. Thousands of people uploading thousands of gigabytes of music all at once would be a strain on any service's infrastructure, even Google's.

Image credit: lead - LifeofAndroid

But with stiff competition from the other big companies who've entered the cloud music locker space lately, can Best Buy offer something that will make customers use its service? Based on what's available today, the answer is "probably not."

The Music Cloud software will scan your iTunes folder (and yes, that's where your music has to reside for the app to work) and then upload files to the cloud. That's a different process - and pretty cumbersome one at that - than the matching service that Apple's soon-to-be released iCloud will provide. As with Apple's new iCloud service, however, you will be able to store some music files locally, so that you don't have to pay a data penalty for music you want to access frequently.

There are two pricing tiers for the Best Buy service: free and premium. The latter will cost you $3.99 per month. The latter, which the website calls "web+limited only" won't let you stream music to mobile devices. But even more frustrating (and inexplicable, really): with the free service you can only listen to 30 seconds of the songs you have uploaded.

There aren't a lot of other details about the service. No word on storage caps, for example.

Perhaps when this officially launches, Best Buy will have more information and a more polished app. As it stands right now, particularly with the other major players out there also building online music lockers, Best Buy's cloud service just won't fly.

While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.

"Cloud Drive" is the brand name of Amazon's cloud-based streaming music service. Although the focus, at present, is on providing an online home to your MP3 collection, the service already supports other types of files, too, including documents, pictures and videos. In this way, it's more akin to Google's Docs service, because, as with Docs, you can upload almost any of the most commonly-used file types to Amazon's cloud.

The caveat with Amazon's service is the price. You get 5 GB of online storage for free, which equates to around 2,000 songs, assuming you are just using the service for music and nothing else. Anything more, and you have to pay. There are storage plans available with yearly fees attached. These include the following annual plans: 20 GB ($20), 50 GB ($50), 100 GB ($100), 200 GB ($200), 500 GB ($500) and 1,000 GB ($1,000).

However, not only do your Amazon.com MP3 purchases not count towards your storage total, the company is also running a special through the end of the year which allows you to upgrade to the 20 GB plan just for buying one album from Amazon. There's a caveat here as well, that "free" upgrade is only good for one year from the date of the purchase. Afterwards, if you don't sign up to pay for the $20/year 20 GB plan, you'll be automatically downgraded to the free 5 GB plan.

For playing music from your online storage, Amazon's Cloud Drive includes a music streaming service called Amazon Cloud Player. This online app provides basic music controls, playlist support and filters for sorting by Albums, Artists, Genres and Songs. It supports the playback of MP3 files, like those which Amazon itself sells, plus AAC files, like the non-DRM files sold on iTunes. It also supports playlist import from Windows Media Player and iTunes.

The player works on both the Mac and PC platforms, plus Android phones. A somewhat kludgy workaround is available now for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), but it's not as polished as the native Android application. It's also not considered an "official" means of streaming your music by Amazon. The company clearly states on its website that "iPad and iPhone are not currently supported platforms for either the Amazon MP3 Store or Amazon Cloud Player." This is mentioned in a side note at the bottom of a chart featuring the Cloud Player's current status for the Web, Android, BlackBerry and Palm mobile operating systems. The fact that iOS didn't even make the chart further hints at Amazon's planned Android-based tablet, reportedly in the works now. By refusing to support iPhone and iPad, Amazon's tablet has a competitive advantage over Apple devices, and Amazon's MP3 store will have a similar advantage over iTunes. (Well, at least until Apple launches "cloud iTunes," that is).

Google Music: Storage for 20,000 Songs for Free, No Music Store

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive offering, Google's Music service is also being launched without the record labels' support. Google's failure to negotiate a proper deal with the labels led to the delay in the launch of Google Music, according to reports.  However, in Google's case, this is a far worse problem than for Amazon because at least Amazon already had a (legal and licensed) online MP3 store where it sells music. Google does not. For end users, that's certainly a shame, but for Google's own purposes, it may not matter as much. Unlike Amazon, Google's main goal isn't to sell more MP3's to end users, it wants to sell Android-based phones. More philosophically, and core to everything Google does, its goal is also to get more people online, using the Web and Google services, all so they can see and click on more ads.

To make up for its missing "store" component, Google is enticing users with features instead. The new service offers things like automatic playlist creation tools and, perhaps more importantly, more free storage. During its initial phase, Google offers beta customers the ability to store up to 20,000 songs for no charge. Google is measuring storage prices in "songs," not GB, for what it's worth. Regardless, Google is offering roughly 10 times the amount of storage as Amazon does, and for free. That's a compelling advantage, and one Google can easily afford. Unfortunately, this "free" option is only available "for a limited time," says Google.

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive, Google Music will involve a lengthy upload process where you use a downloadable client software application installed on your Mac or PC to copy songs from your computer to the cloud. Also like Amazon, a Flash-based Web player will allow you to play your music from your computer, including Google's own Chrome OS operating system. And finally, while Amazon offers a native Cloud Player app for Android, Google will instead update its own Music application for Android, a core app that ships on all Android phones, with support for Google Music. We had previously seen this application in the wild, thanks to users on a popular mobile forum site, XDA-Developers, who discovered a way to install the newer version of the Music app on their phones. They discovered songs could both be streamed and synced to Google's Cloud right from the mobile device itself. Amazon, however, only allows uploads (syncing) from a PC. But both Google and Amazon will support the ability to download songs to your mobile device for offline listening, it appears.

A notable difference between Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music is the scope of its offering. While Cloud Drive supports other file types beyond just songs, Google Music, as the name suggests, is for music only. For online storage of other files, Google offers Google Docs, also available as a native Android application.

For now, Google Music will be invite-only - Google I/O attendees will receive invites, as will users of Motorola's Xoom Android-based tablet computer on Verizon, according to TechCrunch.

Geographic Restrictions

Both Amazon's and Google's products are limited to select geographic regions, it should be noted. Currently, Amazon offers Cloud Drive to the U.S., plus Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

At launch, Google Music will be U.S.-only.

Note: This article will be updated after Google's official announcement today. Current sources are AllThingsD andTechCrunch, both of which confirmed these facts with Google.

Image credit: lead - LifeofAndroid; player screenshots, forum user RazorHail

But if Google Music is so close to launch, after having been in development for over a year, why is Google just now buying the technology of a small-time competitor in this space? What hole does PushLife fill?

From Toronto-based PushLife's website, a message reads, in part:

We'll be joining Google's engineering team in Canada, and will be working on building better mobile applications for all users.

According to TechVibes and StartupNorth's coverage, the company was acquired for $25 million. To put that number in perspective, when Apple purchased the streaming music service Lala.com, it was (reportedly) for $17 million.

What Did PushLife Do?

In the service's FAQ, it's revealed that the company's application was relatively new - arriving in the U.S. in January 2011. The cross-platform mobile app supported Nokia (S40 and S60), LG, Samsung, BlackBerry and Android mobile devices. To use the service, a "PushLife-enabled" mobile phone plugs into a desktop computer, then syncs with either iTunes or Windows Media Player, depending on user preference.

This functionality sounds similar to what several third-party applications now provide for Android users: a pseudo-iTunes desktop experience. For example, with the popular doubleTwist application, users can sync their iTunes playlists, videos and photos to their Android phone, even over Wi-Fi.

So Google Music Gets Desktop Sync?

For Google, PushLife's technology could help provide a stopgap solution that bridges the planned Google Music cloud service with a service offering desktop sync. Like Amazon's recently launched Cloud Player for Android, Google's new Google Music service was going to sync tunes from the PC to the "cloud," in this case, the cloud being Google's own servers.

This functionality was revealed by accident when users on the XDA-Developers forum managed to turn on the feature on their Android devices. They also discovered a new "steam music" option.

But streaming is still an emerging technology use case for mobile music consumption, and one that's plagued by issues involving shoddy 3G connections, lack of cellular signal and other bandwidth-related problems. Not everyone can - or wants to - stream their music. Some still prefer to sync their phones with their PC, as iTunes provides.

PushLife was offering that same sync feature prior to its Google acquisition, in addition to some sort of store functionality, which allowed users to purchase music, videos, wallpapers, games and ringtones from their phone. It's reasonable to think that Google will offer at least some of these features in its new Google Music product, once the acquired technology is integrated.

If so, that means that Google is attempting to one-up both iTunes and Amazon's new Cloud Player service, the latter which provides cloud-based music streaming from Amazon's servers, but not desktop sync where tracks physically stored on the PC are directly copied over to the mobile phone.

It will be interesting to see if PushLife, once integrated, will continue to offer iTunes and Windows Media sync, in addition to support for purchases from Google Music itself, or if the connector functionality will be limited to Google services only.

But Wait, Didn't Google Already Have Desktop Sync Functionality?

What's also intriguing about this acquisition news, however, is that the functionality that seemingly stands at the forefront of PushLife's service - desktop sync - was not something Google should have needed. In May 2010, Google bought Simplify Media, a company which also had offered desktop syncing between iTunes or Windows Media player and mobile devices.

What then, did PushLife offer that Simplify did not? Could it be that store functionality, with its easy way to purchase music, videos, wallpapers and more, that Google really wanted? Or maybe it was PushLife's ability to let its users manage their library, create and edit playlists and socially share their music interests with friends? Then again, maybe it was PushLife's recommendations feature, which could compete with iTunes' Genius?

Whatever the case may be, it's clear that Google is attempting to build a real iTunes competitor with its Google Music product - one that includes sync to desktop and cloud, plus online storage and streaming.

On Wednesday morning, ReadWriteWeb will be heading down to Mountain View with everyone else to see the latest that Google has to offer. The company is holding an event to provide "an in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos" and we thought, what's a super secretive event like this without some semi-unfounded speculation and educated guessing?

So, we dug around on the Internet a bit, took a look at some other technological palm reading and put it together for those of you who just can't wait until 10 am PST.

Engadget, Android and Me, and Into Mobile all make the same prediction, positing that a simple unveil of Honeycomb, the tablet-only release of Android, can't be all that's in store for us at Google.

Web-Based Android Market Update

Android and Me cites a "regular source who has provided accurate information on Sprint in the past" as the one behind its story that "Google has finally completed its web-based Android Market" that is "said to be 'on par with that of the Apple Store or even better.'"

So why are people excited about a new Android Market? Take a look for yourself. Put plainly, the current market stinks. It's a Google site that you can't even search. It has three categories. Who knows how it's organized. Suffice to say, any improvement here would be big news for Android users.

Just take a look at the Android Market the company showcased at last year's Google I/O. Here's a video of Google's expected new marketplace:

Google Music

As for Google Music, Business Week reports that Andy Rubin has taken control of any mobile music effort at Google and headed it in the directions it needs to go.

Rubin felt Android needed better music features to compete with the iPhone, so he wrested away that project last year, according to a former executive, and is now working with a former YouTube lawyer, Zahavah Levine, to acquire licenses from the four major music labels. His group has developed a service that will let users upload their music collections to Google's servers and then synchronize them with any mobile device, according to three people familiar with Google's plans. The offering could be unveiled as soon as next month. Representatives of the music labels with knowledge of the talks caution that no deals have been signed. As one of them says, however, Google's music effort has more credibility now that Rubin is running it.

In that same video embedded above, you can also see Google's Vic Gundotra demonstrate a number of features that would make up much of the Google Music product we've all been waiting for - full-streaming of your music library straight to your device from the cloud. So, obviously Google has been on track with these features, but simply hasn't unveiled them yet. Tomorrow is a good a time as any, right?

What About A Fork?

Then again, at an Android and Honeycomb event, what if Google were to finally announce that it is officially forking the Android OS? As thinkmobile pointed out late last week, a Honeycomb (read: tablet) UI just might not make sense for smartphones. And vice-versa. Originally, Honeycomb was touted as tablet-only, but then some code was found that seemed to prove that it was also intended for smartphones. So will the OS officially split into two different animals? Or will Honeycomb become the one and only Android?

Then Again...

Then again, it could be none of the above. That's how it goes with predictions, right?

No post like this is complete without calling on all of you to chime in and let us know what you think. So, what do you think? What will Google announce this time around?

CNET cites "multiple music industry sources" in its story, saying that Google "first stoked excitement among executives at some of the top four major labels during the Consumer Electronics Show in January".

Google recently moved further in the direction of competing with the dominant duo in the music world, Apple's iTunes and iPhone (or iPod), with its acquisition of Simplify Media. As the company demonstrated at its Google I/O conference, Google will use Simplify Media's technology to allow Android users to stream music directly from their desktops to their phones. Already, some are questioning whether or not this, in addition to a Google music service, could overthrow Apple's complete dominance in this sphere.

The one real question we have for both Google and Apple is "what's taking you so long?" While both companies lumber along and talk about cloud-based music, companies like MOG and a slew of others already offer a plethora of online music for pennies on the dollar. MOG, for example, offers more than seven million songs on demand for $10 a month.

Of course, none of these services have the immediate market reach and influence that a service by either Google or Apple would have, so we'll just have to wait and see which one gets there first. A first-place finish by Google could, however, lure some leery iPhone users in the direction of Android.

It is important to note that a lot of Google's competitors in China, including Baidu, Sohu, and Yahoo, have recently been sued by the music industry in China because of their MP3 search engines which often link to illegal copies. Indeed, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the record industry's international lobbying group, 99% of all music files distributed in China are pirated (in 2005, by the way, the piracy level in China was 'only' 85%). Baidu's MP3 search engine is responsible for about 7% of the traffic to its service.

While Google has clearly been able to work out deals with the music industry in China, it is currently locked in a number of battles with the music industry in Europe and the United States, and we don't expect that Google will offer a similar service anywhere else in the world anytime soon.

It will be interesting to see if Google manages to steal away users from Baidu thanks to this new offering. If anything, users have shown to be quite resistant when it comes to changing their search habits, and while Google's MP3 catalog is interesting enough by itself, it remains to be seen if it can be competitive against the other MP3 search engines in China.