Amazon opens music locker in the cloud

Amazon.com's new service lets clients store songs on the company's servers and play them on devices running Google's Android software. Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, nevertheless the company could face legal trouble from the music industry.

Amazon's new service will allow users to store data in a cloud that they can access anywhere with an Android device.

Kai Ryssdal: Amazon.com started as an online bookstore lo these many years ago. Now it sells at heart anything you can think of ordering online, and lately the company's been signaling it wants to be moreover. And especially, it wants to be like Apple.

Last week, Amazon launched its own app store for smartphones that run on Google's Android platform. Today it announced Cloud Drive. It'll let you upload your music to Amazon's servers so you can at the time stream those tunes to any computer or Android phone anywhere.

Bob Moon: "Cloud" computing has been widely hailed as the way we'll stay connected to our data henceforth. In substance, it's storing your music, personal videos, pictures and other files in a remote "locker" of sorts that gives you access to what you want from just about anywhere.

Now when it comes to online music sales, Apple's iTunes remains king. Nevertheless Amazon is hoping its offer of remote storage will be a game-changer.

Associate editor at CNET

Scott Stein is an associate editor at CNET. He says Amazon seems to be positioning itself to take on Apple as a one-stop shop, competing in the marketplace currently dominated by the iPhone and iPad.

Scott Stein: They nearly have everything however a tablet at this stage. They have e-books that a lot of people already use with the Kindle. They've already been able to sell mp3s online, yet this as a matter of fact adds a cloud service for accessing that music. They even have an app store now. So actually the only other provider out there that has that breadth of service is Apple.

Stein: It's a great move for the Android platform, and I think it's a big win for them. I think a lot of people, when they see that, are going to want it on their other phones, as so then.