Amazon came first with the cloud music storage service, but Google tried to trump them. While I never tried out Amazon Music because I just didn’t find it compelling enough, I have been test-driving Google Music for a couple of weeks now. Why did I find it more alluring? Storage space! Now Amazon is upping the ante, though.
While Google has no paid plan and no space limit, simply offering 20,000 songs of storage, regardless of file size, Amazon now has a different, but also intriguing, plan. It does come with one important, and potentially deal-breaking, caveat – you have to buy the music from the Amazon MP3 Store. The unlimited storage they are advertising is for music you buy FROM them. Although, if you already have an account, and have uploaded a bunch of non-Amazon purchased music you will also have unlimited storage….for a limited time. How limited remains to be seen.
If you are wondering just how much space 20,000 songs takes up, well, I can’t say for sure, it varies based on your file type and encoding. However, I can say that my 11,000+ songs (most at 256 KBPS) total approximately 90 GB. That’s only slightly more than half of the number of songs that Google Music is willing to store in the cloud at no charge.
I am a big fan of Amazon and a regular customer, but for now I am happy with my choice of Google Music. Amazon will need to go a bit beyond today’s announcement to sway me. With this market still being new and just starting to heat up, though, I expect that they will be forced to compete with, not only Google, but the upcoming Apple threat as well.