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Google has finally launched Music Beta, a cloud service that stores your music and lets you stream it to any browser or Android-based device. It’s invite-only for now, but the beta version is free. It’s not without its limitations, but we think it will certainly become a viable competitor against Amazon’s recently released Cloud Player. Here, we present a chart that compares the two services.
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| Music Beta | Amazon Cloud Player | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage capacity | 20,000 songs | Anywhere from 5GB to 1TB (that works out to around 740 to 152,000 songs, assuming each song is around 4 minutes long recorded at 255Kbps) |
| Cost | Free and invitation-only for now. | 5GB storage for free; $20/year for 20GB, and $1,000 a year for 1TB. Songs bought on Amazon don’t count against the limit. |
| Offline options | Recently played songs are automatically cached for offline listening on Android devices. You can also manually select songs/albums for offline listening. But you can’t download songs to a different computer. | You can download the songs to a different computer/device without restrictions. Amazon Cloud Player also uses caching to optimize streaming on Android. |
| Free music | Google provides some free samples during initial setup | None |
| Store | None | Yes; songs cost $0.69 to $1.29 and albums are $7 on average. There are often $3.99 album deals as well. |
| Mobile | Android app; playable on iOS via the browser | Android app; playable on iOS via the browser |
| Requirements | Google account. U.S. only for now. | Amazon account. U.S. only for now. |
| Other features | Custom playlists that can be synced with the cloud, intelligent mix | Amazon’s Cloud service extends beyond just music. |
| Sorting | New & Recent, Songs, Artists, Albums, Genres, Time, Song Title, Plays, and Rating. | Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Time |
| Edit song info? | Yes | No |
