Make a commitment to music in the cloud

In one of their early hit singles, the Rolling Stones asked us in no uncertain terms to get off of their cloud. In 2012, Apple, Amazon and Google are inviting you to climb on to theirs, and they’d like you to bring your music library.

It’s all about Internet — or cloud-based — music storage. It’s becoming the new norm. However as free-spirited as that sounds, there’s no real possibility for experimentation here. You’ll be making a commitment of sorts. Who knows how interchangeable they’ll be hereafter? So let’s look at how to determine which service is right for you.

Few weeks ago released iTunes Match

Apple just a few weeks ago released iTunes Match, which stores your music in the cloud and streams it to your gadgets. Google started selling digital music in November and as well offers cloud storage. Amazon pioneered the option of cloud-based delivery and storage back in March.

Deciding which to use starts — for the moment for now — with your choice of media player and your listening preferences. During iTunes Match is probably slightly better in the balance, that isn’t going to matter if your smartphone or tablet is an Android, to illustrate.

iTunes Match for Apple’s iCloud and iTunes is $25 a year. With iCloud and the latest version of iTunes, Apple started moving away from syncing devices. When you download a new song, book or TV show, it automatically appears on all your Apple devices.

The 20 million songs in the iTunes store

It looks for matches from the 20 million songs in the iTunes store and automatically adds those matches to iCloud. Songs are without warning available to all your Apple gadgets.

If you have a few songs that Apple doesn’t, iTunes uploads them from your computer. Apple provides 5 gigabytes of iCloud storage free for those replacement files. If you have a lot of music it doesn’t recognize, you can add more storage for a yearly fee.

Although iTunes and iTunes Match work fine on a PC laptop or desktop at home, they’re in effect meant for Apple gadgets. The service won’t work at all with Android smartphones and tablets.

The Amazon MP3 app

With the Amazon MP3 app, you can get the service on other Android tablets, too. You can as well access the Cloud Player from any Flash-enabled browser.

However, until Amazon releases an app, there is no easy way to access Amazon’s Cloud Drive on your iPhone or iPad.

Google Music works best with Android phones and tablets. Download the Google Music app, and you’re ready to stream or download. It works fine on PC or Mac computers. Like Amazon, support for iOS gadgets is non-existent.

Kim Komando hosts the nation’s largest talk radio show about consumer electronics, computers and the Internet. To get the podcast, watch the show or find the station nearest you, visit www.komando.com. E-mail her at techcomments@usatoday.com.