Paul’s Tech Makeover: Embracing our Cord-Cutting Future (Premium)

Thanks to reader feedback, I've expanded the list of cord-cutting services that I will be testing. But it's become very clear that each has its own issues. And that the move to a cord-cutting service will require the same ability to give up the expectations we have from past solutions and be open to doing things differently.

In other words, it's all about embracing change. Isn't it always?

I don't believe I ever wrote this up, but for a long time, I had planned to write something about the shift one needs to make to adopt any cloud service. The example I thought of at the time was music services, which of course evolved over time as connectivity improved and technologies changed.

That is, in the beginning of the digital music revolution, we were able to rip our audio CDs, curate our digital music collections on our PCs, and then sync that content, including custom playlists, to portable devices like the iPod and other MP3 players.

Over time, of course, the center of this system shifted from the PC to the cloud. And services, like iTunes (Match), Amazon Music, and, later, Google Play Music, let us upload our own music to the cloud so that we could stream it anywhere and sync to devices---increasingly, smartphones---from there.

More recently, subscription cloud services like Spotify and Apple Music have emphasized access to their own cloud music libraries over customers' own music. Some, like Spotify, in fact, provide almost no way for you to access your own music: It's all about the services' libraries, not to mention their curated playlists and other personalization features. (Yes, I know you can technically access your own music on Spotify, but this is not commonly-used and it's hard to use.)

For younger folk with no personal music collections---like my daughter, for example---this is fine. They don't need access to ripped CD music from yesteryear, and they are perfectly fine with the 4+ million songs that Spotify and other modern services offer. They'll never look back because there is nothing to look back to.

For those of us who did, however, rip our own CDs and then carefully back up the subsequent digital music collections and playlists, our options are getting limited in this new world. Groove Music Pass is no more, as you know, and Amazon just this week shut down the ability for its Prime Music customers to upload an unlimited number of their own songs to the service. Apple, through iTunes Match, and Google, with Play Music, are the only viable choices for those who wish to access their own ripped music from the cloud. (Spotify, as noted, is useless in this regard.) One wonders when those services will disappear, frankly.

The point of the article I had meant to write about cloud computing in general and about music services specifically, was that one needed to "think differently" in order to make a successful transition. If you go into these things expecting that everything is going to be just like it was bef...