Amazon.com, as a bit of a preemptive strike against Apple"s upcoming iCloud service, has announced late today that it is now offering unlimited space on its cloud service for people to upload their music files. Amazon"s press release today announced that for the price of $20 a year, customers will be able to upload an unlimited amount of MP3 and AAC music files to its cloud server. The $20 a year subscription still limits users to 20 GB of file storage space.
In addition, Amazon.com has announced that all past and future MP3 music files purchased directly from Amazon can be stored in the Cloud Drive for free. Finally, Amazon has now released an iPad version of its Cloud Music player, letting people play their music stored on Amazon"s server files via online streaming on Apple"s tablet device. The cloud service has also been optimized to work on Apple"s Safari web browser. The Amazon.com Cloud app has been previously released for the PC, Mac and Android based phones and tablets. The Cloud Drive service itself was launched by Amazon.com last March.
This new move by Amazon is clearly a response to Apple"s announcement in June of its upcoming iCloud service which will allow iTunes users to also stream music files to its users. iCloud is expected to officially launch from Apple sometime this Fall for users of iTunes as well as the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. It will be interesting to see if this new move by Amazon will cause some Apple users to think twice about using iCloud.