Alan Adams: Amazon Cloud Player Streams Your Music Collection to Your Android Phone

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Amazon Cloud Player Streams Your Music Collection to Your Android Phone

We know that Google is planning a streaming music service for Android devices, and rumors of Apple offering a similar product have been circulating for years. Late last night, though, Amazon stole their thunder. With little to no fanfare, Amazon unveiled 'Amazon Cloud Player,' a service that comes bundled with 5GB of free Cloud Drive storage for uploading your music and other files, too. The actual Cloud Player comes in two flavors: a web-based music manager, and a music player for Android that is now built-in to the Amazon MP3 app.

Signing up for the service is a little cumbersome. If you don't already have a Cloud Drive account (which you probably don't), you'll have to sign up for one. Once you've uploaded some music -- which is simple enough using the giant "upload" button on the Cloud Drive page -- you'll then need to sign up for Cloud Player. You have to do this from the Amazon site on you computer; it can't be done from your phone, and it wasn't immediately apparent to us that Cloud Drive and Cloud Player required two separate sign-ups. Once we signed up on Amazon, we had to log out of our account on our phone and log back in to force Amazon MP3 to pull up our music.

Gallery: Amazon Cloud Player