There's been a lot of expectation that Apple's iTunes will eventually run "in the cloud", meaning that you would stream songs that you purchase from an iTunes web site rather than download them to your computer and iPod. Google is also supposed to be working on something similar. But Amazon beat them both to it and has recently released their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. I've been trying it out quite a bit over the last couple weeks and its great.
Any MP3 song or album that you purchase from Amazon can now be stored on their server, the Cloud Drive, so that you can stream it to any device that has a Cloud Player. Mainly, this would be your computer or your phone. All music you purchase from them can be stored on the Cloud Drive indefinitely for free. Also, up to 5GB of other music that you did not purchase from them can be uploaded and stored for free. If you purchase even one album from them, they will upgrade you to 20 GB of free storage. It isn't clear to me whether the free 20GB upgrade is for just one year or indefinitely, but I think its just one year. Otherwise, the 20GB storage plan is $20/year (not per month).
The Cloud Player still lacks some nice features that iTunes has. You can't edit song information once you've upload a song. And you can't rate songs, which I found to be a nice feature in iTunes to quickly highlight the best stuff in a big collection. But the fact that I could immediately listen on my phone to the music that I uploaded via my computer was a big enough plus that I can live without those things.
I imagine that if you're a heavy Apple user, then you'll probably want to wait for the cloud version of iTunes. But if you use your Amazon account as much as you iTunes account and/or if you have an Android phone rather than an iPhone, then you'll probably want to check out the Cloud Drive and Cloud Player.
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