For a while now techie types have been wondering who would be the first to offer cloud storage of your music collection. Apple, Google, and Amazon have all been rumored to be in the game. All of those companies currently offer some type of cloud storage, but just not the full on storage and access that music requires .
Well, this week Amazon made the first move. In an interesting gambit, Amazon will allow cloud storage & access to Blackberry, Palm, and Android devices, but not to any Apple devices. That's an interesting little tidbit.
The service provides 5GB of storage for free (that's about 1200 songs) and then offers more storage for a fee. The best part though is that you can access your music and play it on your device without it actually being on your device. This means that my new Motorola Xoom can have access to my entire 50GB music collection without having one song loaded on it. Cool huh?
When the service was announced, Amazon vice president of movies and music Bill Carr said: "Our customers have told us they don't want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices." You know, that's true. As I get more and more devices, it's harder and harder to remember what I've loaded where. That's especially true for someone like me who has a music collection that is too large for all of my portable devices (except for my 60GB iPod).
I love the idea of being able to get my music anywhere I want it. In my opinion, that's the way it's supposed to be. The big music companies aren't too happy about that, but that's to be expected. At first the thought was that Amazon was trying to bypass them, but now come rumors that Amazon is actually in negotiation with the large music providers to get them on board with this.
Either way, the genie is out of the bottle & it's only a matter of time before this becomes the de facto standard.
The best part is that it will only get better as Google and Apple get involved.
Rumors about an online version of iTunes have been rampant since mid to late 2009, but now it looks like there's a little truth to the idea...maybe. Apple will be launching an online music service that will allow users to listen to music streamed over the internet. Experts say the new application could become a major threat for music websites such as Spotify, a service that allows users access to millions of songs through a paid subscription. 
