The site will allow web and Android users to stream up to 2GB of music to any device.
Amazon (AMZN) just beat Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) to the Music Cloud with the announcement of their Cloud Player.
Both Apple and Google have been rumored for years to be working on Cloud Music services. Both companies have picked up start ups – Google picked up Simplify Media while Apple nabbed Lala.
For some reason, mostly blamed on licensing rather than technology, neither has been able to bring a product to market.
But today, a third player enters the market with a pretty compelling offer. Amazon will allow you to upload 5GB of your music (the same size as the original iPod~1000 songs) for free. If you buy some music from Amazon, that limit goes to 20GB, which is about 4000 songs. For a lot of people, that’s all they’ll need.
The player works on PCs, Macs and Android devices. It won’t work on iOS devices, at least not yet, because the uploader is built with Adobe’s (ADBE) Air platform.
Also, Amazon’s cloud isn’t just for music. It also stores documents, photos, videos and any file under 2GB in size.
Amazon has a strong history of reliable Cloud services with is S3 Cloud engine serving many of the world’s larger websites, including Twitter, so it should excel in this area. However, it will be interesting to see how its services can handle this load.
Also, we recently profiled Dropbox. They aren’t having a good morning.
It will be interesting to see how Apple and Google respond. Apple’s next generation OS is expected to be displayed at its WWDC in June, while Google’s I/O is where we first saw Google’s streaming music store. Perhaps we’ll see a finished product this year.
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