Best Buy announces Music Cloud service
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)…
