So it’s been a little while that this launched in the UK. One week to the day, in fact. (19th September 2012 – we’re the 26th) I kept seeing it in the corner of my website of predilection (amazon – I’m a Prime member… I order a lot of things…) and thought it was about time to go have a look and see what it is.
So what is it? Well. You install an “importer”, which reads your music library and syncs it to the cloud and your devices. It’s free for up to 250 songs. I have 3500+, so if I want them all to travel around with me, I’d have to fork out £22 / yr, which can store up to a totally arbitrary yet staggering 250’000 songs. Comparing that to the lovely spotify’s £10/month… (£120/yr), it has a nice low feel. But this is all music you actually own.
Of course I don’t play music off of my iPhone, the battery’s barely able to last through my working day (leaving the office with 54% at 17:30 is insufficient), and I’d be devastated if I left work without the ability to call, text, or use maps. So then what’s the point? Well, it can play it off a browser, you see. And if you want to listen to new things, you can buy them. So it’s not quite unlimited listening… but it does give you portability and the option to discover new things. And it’s powered by Amazon, the biggest cloud services provider in the world.
This is an excellent way of cloud-enabling one’s media library and I hope that other things (video?) can follow suite eventually. If Apple had done it, it would’ve been better integrated. But you know what? I don’t care that it’s yet another location to keep my music. Not much. I hate iTunes anyway (bloatware that can’t be told what to do / keep) so the idea of some day moving to another way of collecting my music has immense appeal.
Go give it a try. It’s dead simple to use, and syncs beautifully. Oh. And it’s free for a short library of 250 songs.