It’s still too early to tell which of these giants
will prevail in the music distribution business, but
all will continue to be the dominant players. While
there are mostly similarities among the various
cloud services (they all play on any device you
choose), some differences may have business
significance. For instance, Google and Amazon
require users to upload their music, which can
take many hours or even days, and some of your
music tracks might be very low quality. Apple’s
service matches your local collection and places
high-quality versions of the music online automatically.
It’s unclear if this is a permanent advantage
because both Google and Amazon could negotiate
similar deals with the music companies. Google
and Apple can sell users expensive smartphones
to play cloud music, whereas Amazon has no proprietary
music player.