Any purchases you buy from the Amazon MP3 Store will automagically be synced to your Cloud Drive and available for streaming in a web browser or on an Android device. You can also upload your local music, photo, or video files to your Cloud Drive for easy access from anywhere. If you need more storage, Amazon has you covered — the purchase of one MP3 album will get you a year of free 20 GB storage capacity, or you can pay according to the fee schedule below depending on your storage needs.
We've just tested out both the web and Android versions of the Cloud Player application and are impressed with both the ease of use and rapid set up of the new service. Within a few minutes we had uploaded a few tracks from our local collection and had tested streaming in Firefox and on our HTC Evo. Streaming from the Evo was a seamless experience on Sprint's 4G network, with a short buffer time and no audio hiccups or stutters in our first listening session.
The U.S. market in particular has been waiting for a great online music streaming experience. Our European counterparts arguably have such a service in Spotify, which hasn't yet secured the licensing deals it needs to launch a comparative experience in the United States. Similar players available in this country include subscription service Rdio, started by the founders of Skype and available for $9.99 a month, and MOG, a former music blog network that launched a music streaming service in December 2009 ($5 a month for unlimited web streaming, and $10 a month for unlimited web and mobile device streaming), along with older players like Napster and Rhapsody.
Amazon's Cloud Drive service looks like a worthy new volley into the music streaming meets online media storage locker space. The ability to store your music collection and other documents online in a media-centric service — unlike something like a Dropbox, which also stores files in the cloud but does not specifically provide any media controls or management in its software user interface — is likely to prove a handy way to keep media online and accessible from anywhere and on whatever device you happen to have handy... provided that device is a computer or an Android device. We're sure users will be interested in an iPhone and iPad version of the Cloud Player app next.
Have you tried out the Amazon Cloud Drive service yet? If so, what did you think?
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