Based on the responses from my poll and talking to people younger than myself at work, a large segment if the population has music collections larger than will fit on most iPod like devices. Thinking about this some more, I can see how it would be really convenient to be able to download an album or two from your collection when you are away from home.
That’s a good article at Ars Technica. Maybe that’s why three different people have linked to it. 
I think the service sounds fantastic. Apple Home Sharing already lets me buy a song on my desktop computer and have it sync to the notebook (and vice-versa), but I still have to remember to manually plug in the other devices and sync them to get updates. I also like that some of the songs I’ve ripped from vinyl and old CDs will be upgraded to scratch-free digitally-mastered copies. I’ll finally get rid of those pops and hisses in Phantom of the Opera. That is AWESOME!
The question I still have is whether all of my smart playlists and meta tags will travel with the music through the cloud. I rarely pick an artist or genre to listen to. I have dozens of complex playlists for different situations and moods. If I can’t carry them from device to device, I won’t be interested in iTunes Match.
Fundamentally, this appears to be the primary difference between Apple’s “cloud” and everybody else’s. Google/Microsoft/Amazon, etc. expect you to put your data on the remote servers, and then let you access it from anywhere via streaming.
Apple’s vision seems to be that the “cloud” is not (primarily at least) storage, but rather a synchronization mechanism: The apps/music/photos/etc stay on the devices (and hence are availble in situations where the network is not available), but are readily (and often automatically) transferred between these devices when networking is available. I’m sure there will be mechanisms to look at your photostream via the web, but that’s not the general purpose.
Even more fundamentally: Everybody else is banking on data becoming remote and apps moving to the web. Apple’s banking on people wanting their data to remain local (but ubiquitous across devices) and their apps native. Time will tell which is the right answer (probably some combination).
For those of us who don’t live somewhere like Redmond, network outages and poor cellphone coverage are facts of life. I simply won’t accept a solution that means I can’t listen to music on a plane, or in a Yellowstone campground, or on a beach in Mexico, or in that cellphone dead zone just outside of town.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:25, topic:584732”]
For those of us who don’t live somewhere like Redmond, network outages and poor cellphone coverage are facts of life. I simply won’t accept a solution that means I can’t listen to music on a plane, or in a Yellowstone campground, or on a beach in Mexico, or in that cellphone dead zone just outside of town.
[/QUOTE]
Heh. Don’t bet too much on the infrastructure for those of us who do live somewhere like Redmond, for that matter. My phone is a pay-per-minute T-Mobile “burn phone” because it’s the only thing that gets even partial coverage at my swanky Redmond address.
I don’t think anybody’s really talking about forcing you to move all your date remote (well, except maybe Google); just extending what you have available in those places where you do have network access. Your mobile phone/iPad/whatever probably doesn’t have more than a couple hundred gig available–maybe a lot less. Even laptops are getting pretty constrained as they move to SSDs–although I expect that will fix itself in short order.
That’s enough to hold a few hours of video, but it won’t hold even a modest movie collection. Streaming means you can supplement it sometimes (and Apple’s mechanism means that you can swap what’s currently on the device sometimes) when networking is available, but local content will always be there.
OK, I know that this is a semi-zombified thread, but I thought I’d check back in.
I sign up for music match, and synced all my iTunes libraries (10,000+ songs), and can confirm that the service does stream music.
On my iPhone (for example), I can ask SIRI to play any song in my library, and after a short pause, the song will start playing. There is no need to download the song to the phone first - it streams over 3G or WiFi.
You can play as it’s being downloaded, but once you’ve downloaded it, it exists on your device until you remove it (or perhaps if you sync again, I’m not sure).
And you can also delete, and redownload music on your desktop.
It’s not “streaming” in the sense that Pandora or Last.fm or Spotify are streaming. It’s “streaming” in that you can play the file as you’re downloading it. But you’re downloading it, and get to keep it.
The thing I’ve discovered is that it really slows down iTunes on my phone. Every move I make now takes several seconds. It’s quite irritating.
However, now my work computer has all my music on it and I can use my new iPad to listen to my entire library. Cool