Amazon wins race to the music cloud

Mar 29, 2011, 18:59 GMT

San Francisco - Web retail giant Amazon has beaten rivals Apple and Google in a race to offer the first cloud music service.

The Amazon offering, which went online late Monday night, allows users to upload their music to the company's servers and then stream it from any web browser or via an app that works on Google's Android operating system for smartphones or tablets.

All existing Amazon customers in the US will enjoy 5GB of free space on the company's Cloud Drive. Anyone buying a digital album from Amazon's music store automatically gets 20GB free for a year.

'Our customers have told us they don't want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,' Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of movies and music, said in a statement. 'Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.'

Both Google and Amazon are reportedly working on similar systems though their projects are not expected to launch until the summer at the earliest.

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