It’s been over a year since Amazon debuted its cloud-based music storage and streaming application, Amazon Cloud Player, and today the app is finally arriving on iOS. This morning, Amazon announced Cloud Player for iPhone and iPod Touch has gone live in the iTunes App Store, allowing users to store up to 5 GB of music for free, and then purchase additional storage, if need be.
The service works much like Amazon Cloud Player for desktop and Android, but you’re not able to purchase any music within the application at this time. (Surprise, surprise). However, Amazon is offering a launch discount – users who pick any premium storage plan will receive unlimited space to store their music files (MP3 or AAC/.m4a) at no additional cost. (The cheapest plan starts at $20/year – normally for 20 GB of storage).
As a refresher, for those who’ve forgotten how Amazon Cloud Player works: a desktop application lets you upload your digital music collection from iTunes or other folders on your computer into Amazon’s cloud storage. Afterwards, that music becomes playable in the app, and is even available for offline listening. You can also create and edit playlists, play music in the background, control the music via lockscreen controls, or use Bluetooth to stream the music in your house or car.
Cloud Player is actually the name of the player front-end to Amazon’s Cloud Drive – a Google Drive competitor that can host more than just music. And Cloud Drive competes with Google Music, the desktop app/mobile app for storing and streaming music purchased via Google’s own ecosystem.
Amazon offers a few perks to entice users to buy from its own MP3 store instead of iTunes. In addition to the (temporary) offer of unlimited storage with any paid plan purchase, any music purchased through Amazon MP3 is stored free in your Cloud Drive.
The Amazon Cloud Player app is available here in iTunes for free. Details on how it works are here.