Amazon steps up again with Cloud Music Player

Earlier this week online giant Amazon unveiled an online cloud music service that allows users to upload songs and then play them back on a range of devices, including Android, BlackBerry and Palm smartphones.

This looks to be another clever move from the retail expert, which last week launched its own Android app store. Interestingly, Amazon has beaten Google and Apple past the post, with the other two also rumoured to be developing similar services.

At the moment, the new Amazon Cloud Player is only available in the US, but hopefully it won’t be too long before we see it in other markets. The new service gives users 5GB of storage (approximately 1200 tracks), but users can pay for a larger storage capacity if desired.

Amazon isn’t the first company to offer a cloud based music service, other companies such as mSpot and AudioBox also do the same. However, launching a cloud-based music service is undoubtedly a good move for Amazon, which already offers a music shopping service. Anyone who purchases an Amazon MP3 album has their storage allowance upgraded to 20GB. Further Amazon MP3 purchases are then automatically saved to the Cloud Player Service but do not count towards the storage quota.

Amazon already offers almost anything that you could want to buy in terms of physical goods and with the launch of an Android Appstore and the new music service, it  looks to offer an even more complete service in terms of digital goods – buying a few bits for the house, why not buy your smartphone apps and music at the same time – and store it in a place where you can always have access to it?

Between Google, Apple and Amazon, one could argue that Amazon is best placed to offer such a music service as it already has so much of the infrastructure in place. Provided that it can develop its app store and cloud player to work as well as the rest of its site, it could be on to a real winner.

It has been rumoured that Amazon is also developing its own Android device, which would make sense as it could then offer even more integration of its services.

Via BBC