Elizabeth Rios, 17, left, and Jessica Alavarado, 17, both seniors at Woodside High School, listen to music while texting in Woodside, Calif. In recent weeks, several major companies have announced services to store individual music collections in the cloud, ready for access online and for syncing to multiple devices.

I’m ready for the cloud. Soon, I hope, it will be ready for me.

Recent weeks have been filled with announcements about music taking residence in the cloud, the poetic name for online storage and software that promises to make lifetimes worth of songs available to anyone, anywhere, as long as those people and places have Internet connections. (Which of course is a long way from everyone, everywhere, but utopian tech dreams tend to ignore mere hardware.)

I can’t wait. Ever since music began migrating online in the 1990s I have longed to make my record collection evaporate — simply to have available the one song I need at any moment, without having to store the rest.

But I have, as they say, special needs. In three decades as a critic I have amassed more vinyl, CDs and digital files than I know what to do with. Periodic weeding can’t keep up with the 20 to 30 discs that arrive in the daily mailbag; the overfull floor-to-ceiling shelves are already straining under thousands of CDs and LPs. Any affection I had for physical packaging, no matter how elegant or unique, has long since vanished; it’s a reference library, not an art collection.

And it grows, and grows, because I never know what I’ll need: the limited-edition 45, the home-burned debut CD. Yet I’d much rather have it in the cloud than in my apartment.

In recent weeks Amazon, Google and Apple have announced services to store individual music collections in the cloud, ready for access online and for syncing to multiple devices. Pandora Internet radio, which extrapolates individual playlists from users’ likes and dislikes, raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a huge initial public offering (followed, however, by a steep drop in stock price; with operating costs and royalties to copyright owners, the company has never made a profit).

Dar.fm recently arrived as a free service that records radio stations — like TiVo for radio — and, as a bonus, conveniently indexes any music from those stations that has been electronically tagged. (Choose a congenial radio station and assemble a well-chosen collection.) Other companies — Rdio, MOG, Napster, Rhapsody — have been offering huge catalogs of music on demand (and transferable to portable devices) for some time as subscription services for a monthly fee, and Spotify, already online in Europe, is likely to join them in the United States soon.

That’s not to mention the many unauthorized sources for music; virtually any album can be found for downloading with a simple search. Free or paid, the cloud is already active.

Good news, bad news

Dematerializing recorded music has consequences. On the positive side, it hugely multiplies the potential audience, letting the music travel fast and far to listeners who would never have known it existed. It escalates music’s portability, as it adds one more previously stand-alone function — like clocks, cameras, calendars, newspapers, video players and games — to the omnivorous smartphone. That’s instant gratification, but with a catch: Smartphones aren’t exactly renowned for sound quality. And the MP3 compression that has made music so portable has already robbed it of some fidelity even before it reaches my earphones.

As the last decade has abundantly proved, freeing music from discs also drives down the price of recorded music, often to zero, dematerializingwhat used to be an income for musicians and recording companies. Royalties generated from sales of MP3 files and by online subscription services are unlikely to ever make recorded music as profitable as it was in disc form.

There has also been another, far less quantifiable, effect of separating music from its physical package. Songs have become, for lack of a better word, trivial: not through any less effort from the best musicians, but through the unexpected combination of a nearly infinite supply, constant availability, suboptimum sound quality and the intangibility I’ve always thought I would welcome.

Now everyone, not just a critic, can feel awash in music, with an infinitude of choices immediately at hand. But each of those choices is a diminished thing; attainable without effort, disposable without a second thought, just another icon in a folder on a pocket-size screen with pocket-sized sound. The tricky part, more now than ever, is to make any new release feel like an occasion: To give a song more impact than a single droplet out of the cloud. This presents a challenge to culturally ambitious musicians: Before they can be larger than life, they have to be larger than the LCD screen.

Stumbling block

But while musicians learn to play in the cloud, I need it as a repository. For the moment, the much-ballyhooed cloud music players leave me unimpressed. Each has different mechanisms, features, prices and limitations, including one major one: They all depend on first uploading the collection into the cloud.

Google Music Beta’s Music Manager has been running for days on my laptop, and it’s barely one-third of the way through a mere 4,000 songs from a single hard drive — a tiny random fraction of the collection. Amazon and Apple will automatically add the music purchased through their respective stores, but the rest is slow going.

Apple is also promising that later this year, for a fee it will share with record companies, that it will implement a service called iTunes Match, which will scan and recognize music and add Apple’s own copies without uploading. That was an idea that mp3.com implemented back in 2000, when its Beam-it function recognized CDs in home computers to add immediately to online collections. But Beam-it was soon stopped by a record-company lawsuit. Now Apple has gotten permission from the major labels, though at least one independent, the archivally minded Numero Group, has turned down iTunes Match, describing Apple’s offer as a “pittance.”

Meanwhile, as many technology writers have pointed out, iTunes Match as currently described will in effect launder music that was copied illicitly, replacing home-ripped files with standardized, good-quality MP3s. But now record labels and publishers will receive 70 percent of Apple’s fee.

As for the far greater part of my music library that’s just on CDs, well, it’s too bad no one is bringing back Beam-it, and even then the uploading would be endless. But yes, it’s charming to see an album that’s nowhere in my phone’s memory available for listening, with the option to copy selected files for offline (which to me means subway) play. The cloud services are, after all, just getting started; speed and storage capacity will only increase.

For me, though, the great hope of the cloud is the subscription services, like MOG and Rdio. Their catalogs are deep, their interfaces sensible, their sound quality decent though not spectacular. For every fan who imagines herself a DJ, there’s a new social curatorial model arising in these services, somewhere between the old homemade cassette mixtape handed to a friend and full-scale broadcasting, with a giant potential library. You can flaunt or hide what you’re listening to; you can get ideas from others’ playlists or copy them wholesale.

But as deep as the subscription catalogs go, they aren’t deep enough: Imported albums, out-of-print albums, minuscule independents and big-time holdouts like the Beatles aren’t in that sector of the cloud.

Yet, again, there’s hope. Apple’s Match is a sign that copyright holders are starting to rethink their licensing terms for the cloud, which will make subscription catalogs even larger. And, practically speaking, for those obscure, orphaned releases there is the unlicensed but hyperactive community of collectors who continue to share their finds online, with downloads just a search away. As for sound quality — well, maybe that’s wishful thinking.

But I have to stay optimistic that it won’t be another decade before all my discs really can disappear into the cloud. And then, having solved the space problem, I can turn to something even more intractable: the time to listen to it all.