Amazon takes music to the cloud

Web giant Amazon upped the ante in the cloud services space on Tuesday with the launch of a cloud-based music platform for Android mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops.

Taking a three-pronged approach with Amazon Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web, and Cloud Player for Android, the offering allows users to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, tablet, Mac or PC. The offering integrates with the Amazon store so music purchases are saved to the cloud drive, while existing content can be uploaded.

Consumers start with 5GB of free storage and those who purchase an album from Amazon will be upgraded to 20GB, while Amazon MP3 purchases saved directly to the Cloud Drive do not count against a customer’s storage quota. Additional storage for other types of content can be bought as an add-on. Music files are stored in AAC or MP3 formats and Cloud Player for Web currently supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari for Mac, and Chrome.

Cloud Player for Android is now bundled into the new version of the Amazon MP3 App and includes the full Amazon MP3 Store and the mobile version of Cloud Player.