Have seen the stuff coming out about iCloud, and have tried almost all the music apps and services available for iOs and Android. Unless I've missed something, there is no one service, at any price, that will give me all of the following:
1) Integrate a recommendation engine with the music I ALREADY own. I owned a lot of CDs which I've ripped as well as some Amazon MP3 albums and some iTunes non-DRM MP3s. There are few of them where I've listened to all the tracks more than once, and quite a few where I'm in no hurry to go through all of them again to rank them. So let me use a recommendation engine to build a playlist from some of the ones I have selected, and help me rank my personal collection without boring me to death.
2) Integrate the music I already own with streaming music that I don't. I appreciate the iTunes Genius suggestions, but even better would be if it would just add those into my playlists and give me the option to buy them if it turns out I actually like them. If I'm building a playlist or doing a sync, that is one of the times I am LEAST likely to want to listen to a 30-second sample. And I've learned my lesson about buying without hearing the whole song first.
3) Make it easy for me to choose just my stuff or just your stuff as well. There are times I really want to just expose myself to new stuff. When I'm in that mood, let me tell you that I don't want to hear stuff I already own. Even better, let me decide I want to hear stuff I haven't listened to before. Note that new stuff doesn't have to mean NEW in terms of dates. I suspect there's a lot of music over the last 20 years I haven't listened to that would be new to me, and that I'd like to add to my menu.
4) Make sure your music is available to me when I'm not connected. This is a particular burn point for me as most of the National Parks, and a lot of both West Texas and SE California are so rural as to have minimal if any Internet connectivity. Use the Slacker model to make it next to impossible for me to extract tracks you have cached if you have to, but give me SOMETHING to listen to if I'm trying to keep my eyes open as I'm driving through the desert.
5) Make your service AWARE of which device I'm on. For my desktop, I am likely to have all of my purchased music on a local drive. So don't sync with the online service and give me two to three copies of everything. On some of my handsets, space is at a premium so only sync the current playlist and a couple of others based on my listening history. And when I'm showing something to a friend, do the "Zune" thing and let me loan them a tune for 2-3 plays so they have time enough to realize what great taste I have.
6) Finally, make sure that ALL of the music is fixed so that I don't have a number of tunes that are real quiet because they were sampled one way, followed by another that almost blasts out my portable speakers. Is it really that hard to sample the amplitude of the next song playing, and see if the range is narrower and so the volume needs a boost?
There you have it. If there is such a service, let me know so I can subscribe ASAP. If you build such a service, please send me a beta invite! :-)
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