Amazon has made a pretty big splash with its Cloud Drive announcement, beating Apple and Google to the punch with music storage and streaming in the cloud. Users get 5GB of free storage for their music, or anything else they’d like to store, and it’s $1/GB for anything over 5GB.
Right now the Cloud Player mobile app is only available on Android, and there’s no word on the status of an iOS app, or even if Apple would approve it, since they may be working on something similar themselves.
ReadWriteWeb challenges all the hype, citing other startups, such as Rdio, have Amazon’s Cloud Drive beat. Rdio offers a much cheaper alternative for users with more than 5GB of music or data. An Rdio subscription also gives users access to their library of over 7 million songs.
I see this as an opportunity for competition in the cloud music storage space. While I have no doubt Apple can come through on providing the service, I wonder if they will compete on price? For Android users, if Google debuts something similar, I would imagine most users would lean towards that since it will probably be free, and more deeply integrated into the OS.
What are your thoughts?
Eric J says
Don’t forget that amazon never asked for permission and the music labels are not ammused.
Chase Livingston says
That’s very true, although I have a feeling Amazon will find a way to work that out.
Eric J says
aka buckets of money 😉
Chase Livingston says
Yep, and clout in the internet world.