Spotify

Two big news items in “the cloud” today, first off Spotify inched ever closer towards its long delayed US launch by putting up a beta invite page for American customers. Second, Amazon.com’s cloud music service beefed up its offerings today with the following new terms and features:

• Unlimited space for music customers who purchase any Cloud Drive storage plan starting at $20/year.
• Free storage for all (past and future) MP3 purchases without counting against a customer’s storage quota (even with a FREE 5GB storage plan).
• Compatibility for Amazon Cloud Player for Web on iPad.

While the new features from Amazon sound appealing (and they are for the most part), it should be noted that the new iPad compatibility does not include music upload functionality, for that you still need your trusty PC or Mac. On the plus side, if you already purchased an album from the the amazon.com mp3 store (like Lady Gaga’s 99 cent Born This Way for example), your account has been upgraded to the “unlimited music storage plan”. As you might expect, the “unlimited music storage plan” does not include unlimited data storage, which caps out at whatever size plan you initially purchased (probably 20GB, if you bought an album).