Apparently, this is the future of the music industry but it is Amazon that launched the first mass foray, into the world of cloud-based music storage and streaming with its Cloud Drive and Player. You get 5 GB of free storage space and, if you buy an mp3 album, you get 20 GB for a year. This is an exciting new development.
But Apple has been slowly building the infrastructure and assuaging the fears of the music industry in preparation for launching a cloud-based version of iTunes. The industry has been speculating about this since Apple bought the streaming music service Lala and shut it down.
Lala enabled you to match your iTunes library with Lala's licensed music catalog and upload the songs that were not. You had unlimited streaming rights to those and could add to your streaming collection at 10 cents per track or buy the mp3's for about 79 cents. It was great for music discovery because you could stream any album in their collection in full once. Getting close, iTunes now has 1:30 previews.
Time will tell if Apple can play the tortoise to Amazon's hare but, for now, we can store our music and stream it from Amazon's cloud. Yes! BP