In a surprising move, Amazon announced that they are offering unlimited music storage space if you purchase an Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan.
For as little as $20 per year you can store your entire music collection on Amazon, and it will not count against your quota. Amazon’s music storage has gone from reasonably priced to extremely competitive overnight.
According to the Amazon Press release this offer is available for a limited time period but they haven’t specified the duration for this offer. If you are looking for unlimited and reliable cloud storage for your music, I think this offer is your best bet.
Here is a short video that explains how this service works.
http://youtu.be/WkQ55Iij-1M
Amazon Unlimited Music Storage – What You Actually Get
If you upgrade to a paid tier of Cloud Drive storage, Amazon will allow you to store unlimited music files for free. The lowest paid tier is $20 for 20 GB of storage space per year, and for that little, you can back up all of your crucial documents, pictures, and files using Cloud Drive without having to worry that your music collection will push you into a higher pricing tier.
You can store all of your MP3 and DRM-free AAC files for free, and store all of your Amazon MP3 purchases for free, including all previous Amazon digital music purchases. If you sign up now you would get a notice just below the “Upload your Music” button which will notify that you have unlimited space for storing your music.
Every time you buy music, you have the option to automatically save it to your Cloud Drive as well as to download it to your PC. If you purchase the majority of your digital music through Amazon, you automatically have a backup of every song you purchased, without taking the time to upload the files to Cloud Drive.
In addition to additional music storage, Amazon announced Cloud Player for Web on iPad. In addition to access from your Mac or PC browser and any Android phone or Tablet, iPad users can now access Cloud Player. All of the iPad users who buy the majority of their music from Amazon now have super easy access to buy and stream their music without downloading it to another device and synchronizing it via their Mac or PC.
What You Still Do Not Get
Although Amazon is making every effort to get an edge on Apple’s yet-to-be-launched iCloud service, they are still falling short. Having unlimited storage for music is invaluable, and will make a lot of users think twice about going the iCloud route. Unfortunately, users still have to upload all of their previous purchases to access them from the Cloud Player.
The wireless carriers and many high-speed internet service providers are gravitating toward usage caps, which is still an obstacle for a lot of users. Apple’s Scan and Match feature will save users a lot of time and bandwidth; therefore it is still the more appealing option.
Amazon’s Cloud Player is very focused on streaming your music to all of your devices. The bandwidth caps imposed by many carriers are still a huge obstacle. Furthermore, if you have a slow connection, the music play will be choppy, and you will always be waiting for songs to finish loading. If you spend most of your time on a cable or DOCSIS connection, this is not a problem. However, if you are one of the many teleworkers who spend a lot of time using free Wi-Fi at coffee shops, you may have already experienced poor connectivity and playback from Cloud Player.
Apple still has the edge over Amazon, because iCloud has a strong focus on synchronizing your music and files among different devices. Even though Cloud Drive and Cloud Player give you easy access to your files and music, you will still have to worry about a synchronization solution for your laptop, smartphone, and tablet.
Is Going for Unlimited Music Storage With Amazon The Right Choice?
These new announcements signify that Amazon is making a concerted effort to compete directly with Apple. It also illustrates their understanding of the threat that iCloud poses to Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. The unlimited music storage option will attract a lot of users to try out the service, but the repercussions of uploading thousands of songs and streaming them to devices could cost the users more in bandwidth instead of saving them anything in the long run.
Amazon’s services are also more hands on and user intensive, because there is no automatic synchronization. If you want to keep local copies of files and music, you still have to manually synchronize the files among your devices. Apple’s synchronization allows users to set it up and forget about it, so there is very little manual user intervention.
Although Amazon is making a valiant effort to get ahead of their competition before the iCloud launch, providing a lot of free storage is simply not enough to satisfy most users. however, keeping in mind their expertise in Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and the capacity for virtually unlimited storage space, the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player seem like an excellent deal, especially for those who do not use Apple devices.
