The Cloud Challenge: Would You Survive, or Totally Freak Out?

Can music fan survive on cloud alone?

Could you survive? Or, would you go scampering for your iPod, your gapingly-large hard drive, your oh-so-familiar local iTunes collection? Could you last a week on Rdio, Spotify, orGrooveshark alone, mixed in with some Pandora perhaps? Or, even Google Music or a cloud-enabled iTunes in the near future?

Or would you totally freak out? Lamenting your constantly-shrinking smartphone battery, fretting about that cross-Atlantic trip, wondering whether your cloud provider of choice is going to last? Worrying about whether your music will be there for you—on demand, whenever you want it?

Will you always need the crutch of fixed downloads? See if you could survive—or, if you are already thriving...

The Cloud Challenge: The Rules

1. No iPod. Put it in a closet somewhere.
2. No local, downloaded MP3s. Save them in an external drive, and put them in said closet. Or, better yet, port them into a cloud-enabled storage solution (including Spotify) for integrated access.
3. No applications for downloading MP3s. That includes the iTunes Store, AmazonMP3, LimeWire, Mulve, whatever. Focus on cloud collections and favorited, cached songs and playlists from now on.
4. No CDs. In car, at home, wherever.
5. Vinyl and cassettes allowed (hey, don't like the rules? find another Cloud Challenge).
6. Radio—in any format—allowed. Hot97, Pandora, Sirius XM, all fair game.
7. You can carry around an extra charger for your smartphone.
8. You can boastfully laugh out loud in social circles, proclaiming, “I can access millions of songs from anywhere!" But you cannot act surprised when your battery is dying, or a connection is totally non-existent.