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Sony’s new Music Unlimited service will be getting iPhone and Android apps to allow people to listen to their cloud music collections on the go, the company has announced. It’s contrary to expectations that Sony might restrict the service to its own devices, such as Sony Ericsson phones, Walkmans, the PlayStation 3 and Bravia TVs.
“When you provide these services, you’ve got to provide customers the ability to access the content wherever they are,” said Sony bigwig Tim Schaaff, speaking at the MIDEM music industry conference in Cannes.
“We don’t see that supporting devices from other manufacturers is a problem to the business model… It’s very natural for us to support Android and iOS over time.” He didn’t specify when that time will come exactly, however.
Music Unlimited launched in the UK in December, letting people choose from 6 million songs to stream to their PCs, laptops (pictured), PS3s and other connected Sony devices, including TVs and Blu-ray players.
It also ‘scan-matches’ the music collection on your PC, making that available to stream to other devices too, without you actually having to upload the files to Sony’s servers.
You can bet it’ll be a part of the upcoming PlayStation Phone — and maybe the competing PSP 2 — but Schaaff’s comments at least ensure owners of iPhone and other Android mobiles can join the fun.
That said, it’ll be interesting to see if Apple approves a Music Unlimited iPhone app. The company let streaming apps such as Spotify through, but its rivalry with Sony is more direct, potentially making Music Unlimited more of a threat.
Music Unlimited is far from the only cloud-music service that will appear this year. Just this week, mSpot Music got its official launch here in the UK, offering a more ‘locker’-based approach where you upload your PC music collection to a server, then stream it to your phone.
RealNetworks is preparing to launch a similar service for music and video called Unifi, while Apple and Google have both been strongly rumoured to be mulling their own cloud services too.
