David McManus says streaming rather than storing is the way ahead

It is somewhat ironic that in this era of gigantic storage capabilities, the trend is to move everything to The Cloud.

The first MP3 player I ever owned was the first MP3 player ever created. What can I say? This desire to be on the bleeding edge of technology has been with me for a long time.

The MPMan could store a whopping 32MB of data which was barely enough for a full album. Even so, after spending years lugging around a clunky old personal cassette player that required – shock, horror – rewinding, the lightness and push button controls of the MPMan felt like I was living in the future – for all of the 25 minutes it took to listen to its entire content, at least.

My current phone has a storage capacity big enough to hold my entire music library, not to mention nearly every digital photograph I have ever taken and more apps than I could ever use in a lifetime. And yet the trend is to keep everything on The Cloud.

The simple concept has it that, with high-speed connectivity available everywhere, why bother filling up your devices with stuff that can instead be accessed on demand wherever you happen to be? Stream it, don’t store it.

Once you move to streaming music, the other great advantage is that you are no longer restricted to your own personal library. Instead an entire world of recorded material is available to you at the press of a button – as long as you have connectivity, that is. Therein lies the biggest problem with Cloud storage. We are not yet close to a point where we can be confident of getting a signal on our smartphones. Even half of one bar may allow us to make stuttering calls or send a text message but try to stream a song under such conditions and you will quickly give up in frustration.

Apple led the way with digital music and . It wasn’t the first to create a portable MP3 player, but when it launched the iPod back in 2001 it started a revolution. I also had the first iPod model and my 32MB of storage was dwarfed by a new 5GB capacity. Suddenly access to barely one album’s worth of music became hundreds of my favourite records in my pocket.

Sure, I had to buy a Firewire card for my Windows computer because those first iPods were only really Mac friendly, but it was a small price to pay to be a part of such a revolution. The concept of buying physical media suddenly became obsolete. Today, in a similar way, buying digital copies of individual tracks or albums when you can simply play anything anywhere seems archaic. Apple is a latecomer to the streaming music party but it jumped in head first last year when it purchased Beats music.

Beats is primarily known for its iconic headphones which no young hipster would be seen without. But the hardware manufacturer had also set up its own streaming music service and this was the real reason for the purchase. Now we discover that Apple is set to relaunch Beats as its own offering, stepping into a market already dominated by the likes of Spotify, Rdio and Google Play Music.

As with those other services, you will get access to a vast library of music for a set monthly fee rather than having to buy it individually.

All the world’s music is yours to choose from. As long as you have a connection...