Since when has music become so complicated? Owning music, syncing it among multiple devices and getting the right app to play your music has become a giant list of chores that you must complete before you can enjoy that newest Kid Cudi track you’ve been waiting on. Seriously, there’s a reason why people download music illegally. Mostly illegal downloads are to avoid paying $1.29 a song for music, but there’s got to be a small percentage of people downloading music illegally just to get music outside of the “walled garden” of digital rights management, subscription services and putting their music onto whichever device they choose.

This summer seemed to be the summer of companies launching music services, what with iTunes adding their cloud features, Google, Amazon and Sony with Qriocity all jumping into this “new” cloud music market. Blackberry and even HP have their own music services. And let’s not count out the recently released Spotify and the infamous Grooveshark making headway into this “lucrative market.”

So is there a best service? Is there an easy way to manage all your music or stream music you might find interesting but don’t want to buy? The answer is that it just depends. What kind of device do you have, are you fine with paying a monthly fee, are you into music discovery?

Spotify being the new kid on the block, as Europe got a taste long before it made its way stateside. It’s clearly picking up steam now that it’s launched, and the fact that they literally get free advertising on Facebook can’t help right? Almost as if every single song you play shows up on Facebook, why is that even a feature?

Last.fm and Pandora still have their place and aren’t going to be replaced by cloud music services anytime soon, but you can’t help but wonder what the future holds. The question I ask is why do we need more of the same? Why over complicate things? If your service makes my music experience easier, then why am I still spending hours of my life uploading songs to your service, trying to sync them to my device, and paying you money to do it?

And this applies to all of them: Spotify, Sony, iTunes, etc. Even the free services like Google and Amazon make it as “simple as possible” to upload and listen to your music from “anywhere” but I’m just not buying it as you get locked into their way of doing things with no real exit strategy if something better comes along.