Amazon rolls out Cloud Drive
This isn’t the first service of its kind and it won’t be the last. Cloud storage has been around for many years. But, Amazon is promoting Amazon Cloud Drive differently: as a way to access your music anywhere.
This isn’t even a new concept. But the leading company to allow uploading of your own music for playback anywhere you like has shut down. Lala was purchased by Apple and then canned last year. The speculation was, and still is, that Apple is planning on creating a cloud-based music service for iTunes. It looks like Amazon is getting a jump on this early.
Of course, knowing the history of public reaction to Apple news, when Apple introduced their own version of cloud-based personal music streaming, it will be touted as a brand new revelation. It will be “magical.” And everyone will forget that other companies have been doing the same thing for years.
Amazon Cloud Drive begins with 5GB of free online storage. You can upload any files you like, including music, photos, videos, documents, etc. The files will be stored in Amazon’s extensive server network securely, meaning you won’t lose any data if your laptop gets destroyed. All of your data can be downloaded or previewed from virtually any internet connected device or computer.
The new killer feature though is Amazon Cloud Player, which will play your stored music on your computer, Android mobile device, or even on your web-connected HDTV. Any new Amazon MP3 Store purchase will automatically be stored in your Cloud Drive account, for download or playback at any time. These purchases do not count toward your total Cloud Drive storage limit, meaning they are stored for free. And if you buy an MP3 album, you get an additional 20GB of storage free for a year.
There are seven Cloud Drive plans to chose from, including the 5GB for free. Paid plans are 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000 GB, each of them costing $1-per-GB per year.
I’ve been using an online “cloud” for years through my “magical” Apple Mobile Me account. I access my music, videos, photos, etc from any device that connects to the Internet.
@Slug, Mobile Me seems cool but these new “cloud” solutions are trying to make things easier and even more automated, like Amazon automatically adding your MP3 purchases to your “cloud” storage/streaming space.
Apple doesn’t give you an option to auto-load your songs to Mobile Me, does it? (Plus Apple is also working on a new cloud music product)