Apple announced iCloud, iTunes in the Cloud a while back. With iCloud, the music you purchase via iTunes appears automatically on all of your devices. You can also download your past iTunes purchases. Where you want, when you want.
iCloud is only useful if majority of the songs in your music library are purchased from iTunes. If you have purchased your songs from other sources, or imported songs from a CD ( I could only think of these two options as I know you guys wouldn't steal music) you are out of luck, unless you sign up for iMatch (iTunes Match).
iTunes Match, launched on November 14th, works on any device with iOS 5.0.1 or higher. You will also need to pay $24.99 yearly subscription fees. Once you are signed up you can store your entire music library (25,000 Songs limit) in the cloud. iTunes matches the songs in your collection with the 20 million songs available in iTunes Store. If a match is found the song will be automatically added to iCloud and available for you to stream on any of your iOS5.0.1 or higher devices. The good part is you don't have to wait hours for 1000s of your songs to be uploaded (I hope Google Music is listening). If a match is found there is no need to upload the song. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality. iTunes will upload the song if it can't find a match for it.
On a separate note Google is going to launch Google Music Store tomorrow, November 16th. Details are fuzzy at this point on what to expect from this launch, but it will be interesting to see if Google also launches something similar to iMatch without the subscription fees.
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