Amazon feeling heat over Cloud Drive storage service
Amazon Cloud Player stores your music and video on the web:…
Pandora Internet Radio is another music streaming service, also available at a basic level for free. Think of Pandora as a streaming internet radio service. You tell Pandora which music you like, and in return, it selects music from its service that matches that style, based on dozens of musical attributes. You get the opportunity to make a lot of refinements to your musical tastes, which Pandora calls your "station." If you don't like the song being played, you can tell Pandora to skip it. You can only skip so many songs at a time, though.
With the announcement of Amazon Cloud Drive, it can be tempting to compare Amazon Cloud Drive to Pandora. That comparison is a difficult one to draw, however, because Pandora and Amazon Cloud Storage offer such different services. Amazon stores your music collection and lets you play it back. Pandora, however, streams its music to you over the internet, allowing you some control over the music you hear. The comparisons that are most useful to you will probably be how you use the services, rather than how they compare to one another.
You have a large music collection
If you already own a large music collection, Amazon Cloud Drive is the way to go. Pandora's an awesome service, but it doesn't interact with your personal collection in any direct way. If you want to back up or store the music you already have, you can fit over 1,000 songs on Amazon's free service alone. Each additional 1GB of storage you buy on a yearly basis will get you another 200 songs or more. It's nice to be able to back up these songs somewhere besides your local hard drive. If you suffer a disaster at your home, your music will be safe.You want to discover new music
Staying abreast of new music can be difficult, especially since the radio isn't quite the vehicle for emerging artists that it was once. Most people want to occasionally discover new albums and new songs, and expand their musical horizons a bit. Pandora is absolutely great for that. Amazon Cloud Drive has some ability to help you purchase music, but it doesn't get new albums to you the same way Pandora does. Pandora uses music you already know you like to suggest other good musical possibilities to you.
You use an iPhone or iPad
If you're an iOS user, Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't offer you much. While the service is already available for Android, it's impossible to know how long it will be before we see it on the iPhone or iPad. We may never see Amazon Cloud Drive on iOS at all. If you want to stream music to your iPhone or iPad, Pandora is the better option.
You want to store non-music
If you're not already using Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive has an additional benefit. You can actually keep nearly any kind of electronic document in the Amazon Cloud Drive. While it's mostly being applauded for its music service, the Amazon Cloud Drive is really an online storage space. The Amazon Cloud Player is a separate service that plays music from your Cloud Drive. The Cloud Drive itself can hold things like tax files, pictures, video, office documents, and PDFs. But you can use both
The thing to remember about Amazon Cloud Drive / Cloud Player and Pandora is that you can use both. Since Pandora and the Amazon Cloud Drive are both free at the basic level of service, there's no reason to choose one over another. You might as well sign up for and set up both, using each as it seems appropriate. In the same way that people once listened to cassette tapes and the radio, depending on their mood, you can use Amazon to listen to your own music and Pandora to explore new music.
[Image credit: Kevin Dooley]
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