So the first of the long-expected online music storage services is out - Amazon Cloud Drive. You upload your own MP3s (and Apple AACs)* and play them through a web browser or Android or Blackberry device. Being Amazon, space is cheap – $1 a GB a year.
It doesn’t work with iPhones and iPads and isn’t likely to – Apple is strongly rumoured to be working on its own online music service.
The selling point is that you upload your music once and use it from many devices, wherever you are. But Spotify fills a similar role and comes complete with a huge library of music, to which you can add your own, and highly sociable shared playlists. For ease and fun, Spotify wins for now.
(Amazon Cloud Storage is also designed for document and photo storage, which we’ll look at later.)
* US customers will find any Amazon MP3s automatically added.
