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Amazon Cloud Player Takes On ITunes With New Features

[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Amazon.com  is revamping its Cloud Player, following a series of licensing agreements. The agreements are with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators and music publishers.

New Cloud Player features include:

  • Amazon MP3 purchases, including music that users purchased in the past, are automatically saved to Cloud Player. Customers have a secure backup copy of the music they buy from Amazon, free of charge.
  • Amazon scans customers’ iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon’s 20 million song catalog. All matched songs, even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs, are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player will also will be upgraded.
  • Any customer with a Kindle Fire, Android device, iPhone, iPod touch, or any web browser, and a Roku streaming player or Sonos home entertainment system  can play their music anywhere.

Cloud Player is available in a Free tier and a Premium tier. Cloud Player Free customers can store all MP3 music purchased at Amazon, plus import up to 250 songs from their PC or Mac to Cloud Player, all at no charge. Cloud Player Premium customers can import and store up to 250,000 songs in Cloud Player for an annual fee of $24.99.

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