Music in the Cloud

Amazon announced their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player to let people store and play music from the cloud. You get 5GB for free which is about 1000 songs.

Now it gets interesting.

Everyone was expecting Google vs. Apple on this one, but Amazon just jumped in there big time. There’s a nice Android app and it works on any browser. Well, any flash enabled browser. Kind of an interesting technology choice given the primary competition.

I loaded my library (imported all my iTunes playlists) and frankly it works great. To me having your music library on your computer hard drive where you sync up other devices with wires doesn’t seem right. Having it in the cloud makes total sense to me.

There are potential issues of course. Doesn’t work so good on the subway. And how will it impact your phone’s no longer unlimited data plan?

What’s fun now is that there is real competition. Apple has been so dominant that they’ve been getting away with iTunes which is kind of a crappy app. That being said, Amazon’s Cloud Player app is going to need improvements as well. It’s definitely a v1 app.

But now we have Apple, Amazon and Google battling over music with the music labels wondering what the hell to do.

Game on.