Amazon pre-empted both Apple and Google in the cloud-stored music market with its Amazon Cloud PLayer for Web and Android in March 2011. Over a year later, it finally reached iOS devices, allowing streaming over iPhones and iPods — and finally, on Thursday, it released an iOS version for the iPad.
The iPad version allows users to sort through music by category — artist, song, album, genre, playlist — and allows you to switch between "device" storage and "cloud" storage, says TechCrunch. Device storage is where users can save music for offline use, which can be done directly through the cloud. The app is universal for iPhone and iPad, so users on an iPad running the iPhone version can simply update their Amazon MP3 app.
In the beginning, the service stored any albums bought from Amazon on the drive for free, and upgraded your Cloud Drive to 20GB for a year, which would normally cost $20. Music, photos, movies and even documents can be uploaded via a desktop application onto the drive and then streamed over the Web or an Android device. Today, it has two tiers: free, which allows you to store 250 songs; and premium, which lets you add up to 250,000 songs for $25 a year. Songs bought through Amazon still do not count toward these numbers.
Only a few weeks ago, Amazon Cloud Player became available in Ford SYNC-enabled vehicles, which would allow drivers to connect their smartphones running the Amazon MP3 app to their system in order to stream music over the car stereo. Other music services available on the Ford SYNC platform are MOG, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Rhapsody and others.
In January, Amazon debuted the AutoRip, which automatically provides MP3s of music from CDs customers have bought. It launched on Roku, Samsung, Sonos, iPhone and iPod Touches. On Apple devices, you can reveal more options, such as downloading, deleting or adding to a playlist, by swiping sideways on any row in the library, Amazon's instructions say.
Amazon's music collection contains over 22 million songs, TechCrunch reports, only 4 million songs fewer than Apple's iTunes, although it focuses more on albums than individual tracks.
