Amazon Cloud Player Beats Apple and Google to the Punch

Amazon has launched a streaming music and an online storage service called Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, respectively. Cloud Drive allows users to store music and other files in the cloud (duh). Music can be streamed to any PC or Google Android phone via Cloud Player. The free version of Cloud Drive comes with 5GB of storage. Users can purchase additional space or purchase a digital album, which bumps their total to 20GB.

This is a bold and exciting move by Amazon. While the company’s MP3 store does well, it’s still way behind Apple iTunes. Offering cloud services (not to mention generally lower prices) could help attract more customers away from Apple. Both Apple and Google are known to be readying cloud-based music-services. Amazon has beaten its competitors to the punch and there’s always something to be said for being first.

Furthermore, Cloud Player looks like another facet of Amazon’s future Android strategy. Last week I speculated that Amazon will almost definitely have Amazon-branded phones and tablets running Google Android. Can you picture an Amazon Android phone with perfect integration of Amazon’s Android Appstore and Cloud Player? Wouldn’t a phone or tablet that offered simple purchasing of Amazon goods — both digital and physical — be a potentially huge moneymaker for the company? It seems so brilliant…and scary.

Let me know what you think of Amazon’s Cloud Player and Cloud Drive (please). Are they services you’d definitely use? Or does music in the cloud not interest you?

Author: RPadTV

https://rpad.tv

17 thoughts on “Amazon Cloud Player Beats Apple and Google to the Punch”

  1. Sounds cool. Oddly the other day I noticed my phone's Sync icon displayed for hours. I started checking my accounts and a new sync option had appeared in my Google account that says "Sync Music". Don't know what it does or where it syncs to but it was syncing my 30+Gb of music I keep on my phone. I ended up canceling the process.

      1. No I am a near stock 2.2. I just found out it is because I installed the Gingerbread music player though (I like the way it looks and works over stock froyo player).

        I just got done going through the Jumper Test (an Icon that appeared with the Music player) and set it up. I am now streaming my music off of Googles cloud. It is still uploading them but I set it to only show streaming music from my cloud. It is pretty cool. If I delete a song off my phone it appears to stay in my cloud. I don't know the size limit yet.

      2. Thanks for the link. I surprised there hasn't been more press on this. Most tech writers are referring to Google's service as something that's allegedly being worked on. If it's in the OS, it's obviously more than that since it's being tested and, for some people, works.

      3. Yeah when I saw it a Google'd it I was sure I was going to find more on it out there, but there is little to no info on it. Which surprises me because it seems like it would be a big feature.

  2. I'm glad to see this happening, and glad that Google isn't the first to offer this for one reason alone. I want this to force other companies to come out with similar cloud services and be more competitively priced than if there was only Google in this market like it seemed could happen before.

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