cloud music

Best Buy Music Cloud streams songs to Android, iOS and BlackBerry smartphones and supports offline mode

Come on, you knew this day would come now that Amazon, Google and Apple have legitimized music lockers in the cloud. Yes, Best Buy is jumping on the bandwagon with a cloud service of their own, dubbed Music Cloud and powered by Catch Media Inc’s Play Anywhere platform. Should you care? It depends, as Music Cloud seems to be a mixed bag of best ideas taken from others, clearly with some limitations stemming from their lack of Apple’s stranglehold of the music industry.

You can upload songs to Music Cloud, just like with Google’s Music Beta and Amazon’s Cloud Player. More importantly, the service lets you stream songs from the cloud to any device, unlike Apple’s service that only lets you download individual files (although that’s likely to change in the near future). Best Buy’s offering, however, excludes the scan-and-match feature that Apple’s iCloud will offer for $25 a year come this Fall. Music Cloud has a couple of other nice perks (and more annoying limitations)…

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With all three players having introduced their respective music lockers in the skies, we can now pit their respective offerings against each other. The above chart is from paidContent which opined that “Apple doesn’t always get it right the first time” before observing that in iTunes “syncing should be faster and easier” while “song quality may get a boost”.

Apple yesterday took the wraps off iTunes Match, a new feature that scans all your music (regardless of sources) to make matching songs instantly available using iCloud. “With 18 million songs we’re most likely to have what you got”, Jobs said at yesterday’s unveiling. He noted that Apple will automatically upgrade all matching songs to 256Kbps AAC. On the downside, you cannot stream songs with iCloud – yeah, you read that right. What that means is you have to download each iCloud song that is not saved on your iOS device before you can listen to it. What else should you know?

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This video just went up on the official Google blog, helps shed more light on the just announced music locker service.

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