Amazon’s Cloud Player is next in line, after Spotify and Samsung Music Hub, to get a fair share of the limelight as far as the smartphone music industry is concerned. Amazon has announced some pretty big improvements to its Cloud Player service and the Amazon MP3 app.
Amazon has signed deals with the major record labels that now allow it to perform its own iTunes Match-style scan of your music collection, freeing you from having to upload all your files. But there’s more good news from the audio quality front. Even if your original files are of a lower quality, once Amazon matches them with its library, the copies you stream will be at 256kbps.
“We are constantly striving to deliver the best possible customer experience for Cloud Player, and today we are offering our customers a significant set of new features, including scan and match technology and audio quality upgrade,” said Steve Boom, Vice President of Digital Music at Amazon. “We are happy to have such broad industry support in enabling these features for customers.”
The new Cloud Player features include –
- Amazon MP3 purchases — including music that customers purchased in the past — are automatically saved to Cloud Player, which means that customers have a secure backup copy of the music they buy from Amazon, free of charge.
- Amazon scans customers’ iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon’s 20 million song catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs – are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player also will be upgraded.
- Any customer with a Kindle Fire, Android device, iPhone, iPod touch, or any web browser — and soon, a Roku streaming player or Sonos home entertainment system — can play their music anywhere.
"Music fans are passionate consumers, so making it as easy as possible for them to buy music and enjoy it anywhere, anytime and on any device, is important to us," stated Rob Wells, President of Global Digital Business at Universal Music Group. “And Amazon’s new service does just that by enabling fans to find, discover and experience more music than ever before. UMG is committed to working with innovative services like Amazon to provide consumers more choice and to expand the marketplace even further for digital music.”
Free Cloud Player accounts can store up to 250 songs (besides those bought through Amazon). For users on the $25-yearly paid plan, that number shoots up to 250,000.
