Amazon Cloud Player may change how you listen to music and store it

Amazon has announced a new music service.  You can now upload your music collection to their servers, or the "Cloud".  Once uploaded, you can access your music collection on any device with internet access.  It can be your computer, your friend's computer, your smartphone, Barnes and Noble Nook, etc.  You just go to a special web page and start playing your collection.  The best part is that it is free (up to 5GB, or the equivalent of about 1200 songs).  If you need more storage, it is just $1 for each gigabyte (about 240 songs).  Personally, I can't use it as my collection of music is almost 52GB, but most can, easily.

In a stroke of master marketing, Amazon has gone a step further.  If you buy an album from their music store, it does not count against your storage limit.  No music purchased from them counts against the storage limit.  In fact, if you buy just one album, you automatically get your storage bumped from 5GB to 20GB, still free.  To continue, the online storage is not just for music, you can store any kind of file on the the "cloud drive", as they call it.  What does this mean?  Essentially, you could back up your whole computer (personal files that is) to the internet for free by simply buying one album from Amazon.  Needless to say, the music industry is not too happy with this, but so far nothing that Amazon is doing is illegal.  Let's see how this plays out.  It is rumored that Apple and Google are working on their own versions of this service.