A couple weeks back, Amazon had Paul’s Boutique on sale for five bucks. FIVE BUCKS. I realized I didn’t have a complete copy and since I’ve probably bought that album five times - first time on cassette - I figured why not one more? Added bonus is it got me the extra space on the Amazon Cloud Player. I’m not using it, but I like Amazon and I figure fine, free bonus. I could also download it, play it on my home system, in the car, blah blah blah.

Tomorrow, Steve Jobs is announcing iCloud. Everyone anticipates there being a music component to it. One possibility is a resurrection of the best of Lala, which Apple bought and buried, that’s being called “scan and store.” Ignore the technicalities. If I can load the 12,538 songs in my iTunes somewhere else, that I will never lose or run out of space for or hopefully never lose it in a hard drive crash or leaving a CD in a hot car, that’s worth some money to me. 

But will it be JUST songs I bought from Apple? I realize that “some people” have songs they didn’t buy. Maybe they downloaded them off the Torrent or Napster or Audiogalaxy or Limewire, not that I’ve ever heard of any of those things. Maybe they ripped them from CD or bought them at Amazon or on the Zune Store. (Ok, not the last one, obviously. No one used Zune.) If I can only use the Apple-bought songs, I probably won’t use it, in the same way I probably won’t use the Amazon store because I’d have to upload all those 12538 songs, really pissing off Comcast. 

Honestly, I just don’t want to pay for a sixth copy of Paul’s Boutique, no matter how awesome it is.