Recently on twitter several friends of mine were discussing the pros and cons of streaming music. There were arguments for local storage or streaming.

There are several services available including Google Music which allows you to store 20,000 songs for free. This is a very worthy feature as most people will be able to upload all their music library into the cloud. Amazon by contrast offers 250 songs before you need to pay and Apple is pay immediately. There are other streaming services from the likes of Spotify too.

I was thinking about the arguments for and after, and basically it boils down to whether you have a decent fast Internet coverage. And a broadband or mobile tariff that can cope with the demand in data. With on device local storage your music is always there but if you have a large music collection you are unlikely to fit it all on your phone unless you have something like an iPod Classic 160gb.

However, I think there is a major advantage of streaming instead of local storage. I have deleted all my music on my iPad and if I want to listen to anything I stream it over wifi to my iPad. This means I free up tons of space to fit more games and all my photos. It also means I don’t have to worry or think about buying a bigger capacity iPad, unless I need more space for games. But this only works because the iPad doesn’t venture away from a fixed wifi spot. If it travelled all over the place then the argument to keep the music on the local memory will win the day.

What’s your preferences?