Amazon Beats Apple, Google to Cloud Music Service

Amazon has launched a new service that allows people to store their music on the company's servers and play it on their computers or Android devices, reports CNET. The move is getting plenty of buzz because Amazon beat both Apple and Google in the development of a so-called cloud system, notes the Los Angeles Times. A handful of smaller companies offer such digital musical lockers, but Amazon is the first big player.

With the Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, customers start with 5GB of free storage (figure about 1,000 songs), but that jumps to 20GB if they buy an Amazon MP3 album. Additional storage can be purchased in various plans. NPR's The Record blog has been playing with the new service and provides some basics for potential users. TechDirt, meanwhile, thinks Amazon could run into legal trouble over whether it needs licenses from record labels to store all this stuff. (More Amazon stories.)