South of the border, the clouds are rolling in.
In the past month, two corporate behemoths, Google and Amazon, have launched online music-storage services. Now, the rumour mill is at full grind with word that Apple, the company that has reshaped the music industry twice in a decade, has got an online version of iTunes ready to descend upon the world.
Let's dispense with the inevitable proviso first. When Google announced that its new online music service will let you "listen to your music anywhere," it does not include Canada - yet. Amazon's service is similarly out of bounds.
The border delay is likely to be temporary, since it's holding up a tectonic shift. Big computing companies like Google, Amazon and Apple - which you might think of as search, books and shiny-object companies - are really becoming data-centre companies, dedicated to sucking as much user data as possible onto their servers, which they euphemize as "the cloud."
Will this change the way we think about owning music? Without a doubt. The question is how much - and how fast.
The Google and Amazon products released this month are fairly simple. They invite users to upload their music libraries. From there, the music can be downloaded and played on any compatible device, like a smart phone or an iPad, sparing the drudgery of syncing.
The term that's being slapped on this kind of service is "digital locker," an interesting choice of euphemism, which brings both positive associations (security, convenience, a sense of ownership) and negative ones (high school, gum stuck to sheet metal, things that smell).
There are more practical impediments. For one, you'll have to upload all of it from your computer first - the kind of time-consuming task that will deter casual users, especially as music collections of well over 20 GB are hardly uncommon, and users could wind up running into usage caps from their Internet providers.
This is why the prospect of Apple's arrival has sparked such interest from observers. According to widely published reports, Apple has once again been negotiating with the music labels. If it reaches licensing agreements for streaming music, it's suggested that Apple's cloud service wouldn't require you to upload your music.
Instead, it would merely scan your iTunes library, and mirror the contents online, drawing from its own vast library, and maybe even swapping in higher-quality versions if appropriate. Then Apple could beam the music straight to any device you desire - and Apple allows.
So the clouds roll lower. For years, technology forecasters have been predicting the arrival of a world in which more personal data will be stored online than on the hard drives we keep in our houses, or on our persons.
But moving music into the cloud has proven surprisingly slow. It's not that people haven't been trying. A succession of startups have offered cloud-based music services over the years, but none achieved more than niche success.
Most of these were subscription services. They offered a buffet model of music ownership: Consumers would pay, for instance, a monthly subscription, and in exchange they'd get access to the service's entire music library. Let your subscription lapse, however, and all the songs go away.
This was at odds with the understanding that most consumers had already developed with the economics of music-buying. Choice was free - take all the radio stations on the dial. Money, however, bought permanence and control; the ability to play an album at will, on demand, in perpetuity. And not just that: Purchasing music was an act of self-definition, like buying any piece of art. It's easier to get a jolt of pride and satisfaction and bolster your self-image from buying an album than from paying for access to something nebulous.
Apple didn't fight these habits with iTunes. As much as the iPod and the iTunes store subverted the music industry, they didn't change that basic relationship people had with their music: You buy it, you store it, you own it, you can be proud of it.
So what's most interesting about the new wave of cloud-music services is how tepid they are. All of them - including, as rumoured, Apple's - try to maintain the increasingly abstract notion that those bits "belong" to the user, be they stored in a proprietary "locker" or mapped to an iTunes library.
After years of cloud-music services failing to gain traction, this new round is trying to reshape expectations the incremental way, by positioning themselves as merely an online copy of our precious collections.
But it couldn't be as hands-off as they'd like to suggest. What about files in users' collections that were arrived at by less-than-above-board means? What about content that's vile, or problematic, or at odds with one corporate policy or another? These will beg for interference and intervention. And is this a way station to a future in which we skip the download altogether, and merely purchase music - in the sense that an Apple database would record that we have access to a certain file?
With Apple pushing a range of products that have hardly enough storage space for even a medium-sized media collection - for instance, laptops like the MacBook Air - it seems inevitable.
The days of keeping your mitts on your own music data seem numbered indeed. Print off your album art: Before too long, it could be all we have left to hold.