Amazon expands cloud music storage for paid users
Unlimited space for Cloud Drive seen as response to Google Music
By Jeff Porten | Macworld.com | Published: 13:08, 08 July 2011
On Wednesday, Amazon took aim at Google (and in some ways Apple) by adding unlimited music storage for paid users of its Cloud Drive online service.
Amazon had already offered free cloud storage of any music purchased from its Amazon MP3 service, and includes 5GB of free storage for other music and files. But now anyone with at least a 20GB storage plan gets to upload as much MP3 or AAC music as they want to the service.
It also appears to work with the free one year 20GB account that Amazon has given away to those who purchase an album from Amazon MP3. Once uploaded, you can stream your music to a Mac, PC or an Android phone using the Amazon Cloud Player software.
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But Amazon also announced Wednesday that Cloud Player is now supported on the iPad. Although it's been possible to use Cloud Player to play music on your iPad for the past couple of months, there were some rough edges. Amazon has now smoothed those edges, making Cloud Player fully compatible with the iPad.
Amazon's new service is more of a shot across the bow of Google Music Beta than it is a direct competitor of Apple's upcoming iCloud. Google Music has the same upload-once, stream-anywhere model, but without the integration of Amazon's MP3 store. Google Music is currently a free service, but getting in means requesting an invitation and waiting for Google to send it to you.
iCloud, on the other hand, offers downloads of your iTunes music collection to multiple devices, and will work with your other music with the $25-a-year iTunes Match service. The service does not offer streaming, which could be an issue if you want to cram your 40GB library onto your 16GB iPod touch.
Amazon is calling this a limited time offer, however, so it may just be a taste of the candy Amazon will ask you to pay extra for in the future.
