As competition increases in the cloud media streaming market, Amazon made a move Wednesday to get ahead of Apple’s launch in fall of its new iCloud service and announced that Cloud Drive and Player are now available for people to store and retrieve unlimited amounts of music files for $20 a year. However, all other non-music files will still have a 20-gigabyte limit of the free service.
Craig Pape, Director of Amazon Music said “Customers are already enjoying Cloud Drive and Cloud Player and now for just $20 a year, customers can get unlimited space for music. Additionally, we are adding free storage for all MP3s purchased from Amazon MP3, and support for the iPad. Our customers love Cloud Drive and Cloud Player and we’re excited to innovate these services on their behalf.”
In addition, Amazon offers 5GB of free space to all Cloud Drive users. They can also upload an unlimited amount of files if they’ve purchased them from Amazon.
Amazon, one of the earliest Cloud adopters, is also offering the addition of an iPad-friendly Amazon Cloud Player which could be a plus for Apple. There was no mention made of iPhone or iPod touch compatibility.