Music clouds have found ways to invade desktops, smartphones and tablets. But has the market finally grasped going digital? The very idea of walking into store to buy music or software is becoming obsolete since the rise of cloud computing. It is one of the biggest tech innovations that hit the music industry in recent years, and is poised to create more than 14 million jobs by 2015. While the term is relatively benign, it’s gaining significant traction from developers and users alike. This has prompted the ascent of brands like Apple iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and more to popularity.

Sony Music and Coraid

Reliability, ease of use and performance drove Sony Music Australia to turn to Coraid for music storage in the cloud.  The Ethernet SAN solutions provider is tapped by the device manufacturer to power its online Australian website Bandit.fm. Coraid has more than 1,500 customers worldwide.

Sony Music Australia has so far been impressed by the performance of Coraid EtherDrive storage systems.  Dustin McClung, Vice President of IS&T Asia Pacific, said, “we wanted to build an infrastructure that would enable us to provide the ultimate experience for consumers.  We needed a high-performance system that would replace our existing NAS storage system as well as scale and give us room to grow.

“We considered other storage systems, but only Coraid offered a scale-out architecture that would allow us to simply add capacity and performance as needed.  The Coraid EtherDrive solution not only met our price, performance and density requirements but also provided the data protection we were looking for.”

iTunes

Apple reaching 25 billion downloads will perhaps be one of the most talked about developments of the week. But, have you ever wondered who pushed them to this momentous number? We now go to Qingdao, China to meet Chunli Fu who was identified as the key “downloader,” bringing the Apple App Store to its latest milestone. He downloaded “Where’s My Water” and now he was rewarded with $10,000 iTunes gift certificate—that’s going to be a lot of songs and apps right there.

“We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded, says Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddie Cue. “When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users.”

Google Play

iTunes’ phenomenal success is bruising Google. But, the search giant and Android maker is not taking this lightly. This week the one-stop-app-shop, Google Play, was launched to replace the Android Market. This platform puts music, movies, books and apps in the cloud for easy, cross-device access and management.

This seems like a good move to encourage more downloading from a user’s standpoint. However, experts see this new product as a response to the lackluster Google Music, which has only attracted two major labels—a complete opposite of Spotify’s beefy portfolio. Google Play hopes to prevent users from tuning out of Google Music.

Spotify

The Presidential campaign season is so on, and has already reached the cloud. Obama’s Spotify playlist was recently revealed and put together by the President’s campaign staff, which consists of three musical hallmarks: country, Indie and REO Speedwagon. Apart from tweeting Obama’s kind of music, the self-proclaimed “OS of music” has been busy overhauling its streaming music service and providing more value to music in the clouds. Music apps and the cloud have turned Spotify into a force to be reckoned with.

Pandora

As Spotify’s celebration continues, Pandora is trying to fight the financial woes brought on by decline in stock value and a lull in consumer advertising sales. The company’s quarterly loss exceeds analysts’ forecast, and this is not a good thing. To add to the anguish, VP of Corporate Communications Jessica Steel is stepping down after a solid 8 years of service rendered for the company. Personal reasons were identified to have triggered her resignation.

Part of the new scheme to invigorate Pandora’s platform is to start issuing key audience metrics on a month-to-month basis. The report will provide advertisers accurate and timely statistics on the quantity and quality of audience share of the internet radio services.

In three years time, the personal cloud will be integrated in almost 90% of consumer devices available. This makes winning in the music arena all the more important for the above-mentioned companies.