Music In The Clouds

A little over a month ago, I wrote this article about smart, portable subscription services that included a lot of techy-talk like "cloud-based storage".  After logging on to Amazon.com today, I saw their homepage announcement of the launch of their very own cloud services, Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.  As Amazon details, the Cloud Drive is a user's "disk drive in the cloud" storing music collections and other digital documents (photos, videos) in Amazon's datacenters.  Basically, customers can store these files on Amazon's Web servers as opposed to their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection.  The Cloud Player has two varieties: Web and Android.  For Web, grab your computer with a web browser, worry not about installing anything, and listen.  For Android, pull out your Android phone or tablet, get the app, and do the same as Web. 

Amazon's MP3 Store boasts a catalogue of 15M songs and now offers the option to put your purchases directly into the Cloud Drive.  Amazon is currently giving away 5GB of free Cloud Drive storage and new purchases from the Amazon MP3 Store are free and don't count against storage quota.


Update (3/31): Sony Music isn't pleased with Amazon after they failed to launch the music locker without new licenses for music streaming, spokeswoman Liz Young said.  "We're keeping all of our legal options open."