Amazon Revamps Its Cloud Music Player to Compete With iTunes

By BEN SISARIO

It has taken more than a year, but Amazon is finally ready to compete with iTunes in the cloud.

On Tuesday, Amazon introduced a new version of its Cloud Player music service, which first arrived last year in a limited form because Amazon did not have licenses from record companies and music publishers. Now, after many months of negotiations, it has gotten those licenses.

So Cloud Player - which, like Apple's iTunes Match and other so-called locker services, stores users' songs so the users can have access to them on any device - now has more extensive and convenient features, like the ability to scan a user's computer to match songs to a master database. That is a valuable shortcut around the laborious process of uploading each and every track, but one that requires a license from copyright holders.

The new Cloud Player is available in two tiers, including a free version that gives Amazon a slight advantage over Ap ple. Users can store up to 250 songs free on Amazon's servers, or 250,000 songs for $24.99 a year; those limits do not count songs bought directly through Amazon's MP3 store, which has long trailed iTunes as the second-biggest download shop but has been marketing itself aggressively with deep discounts.

Some more detail:

• Like iTunes Match, Amazon's Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity.
• It will not, however, upload songs coded with D.R.M. copy protection, which includes virtually everything that iTunes sold until early 2009.

Amazon's revised cloud service also puts pressure on Google, whose cloud music and media service, Play, has been stymied by licensing issues.

Play sells downloads from three of the four major music labels, but it lacks a deal with the Warner Music Group, whose acts include Green Day, Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And while Google also has an unlicensed cloud locker system, its attempts to get licenses for that service have been hampered by the music industry's longstanding complaints that Google has not been doing enough to prevent piracy.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.