MP3tunes, which offers cloud storage and playback for your music library, just launched a new initiative called “Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere” which highlights how the service’s users can buy music from any of the major online music vendors like iTunes, Amazon or Napster and then sync this music wirelessly with any MP3tunes compatible device. MP3tunes currently supports Android phones, iOS devices and a number of Internet-connected radios. According to MP3tunes founder and CEO Michael Robertson, the company wants to ensure that users have the ability to “shop [for their music] at any store and use it with any device.”
Thanks to an update to the service’s native Android app, users can now, for example, buy a song using their Android phone and listen to that song on an iPod touch or Logitech Squeezebox within minutes. Similarly, iTunes users can download songs on their PCs and then play the music back on their Android phones or through MP3tunes’ web interface. Sadly, Airband, the MP3tunes iOS app, hasn’t been updated to take advantage of Apple’s new multitasking features yet.
For a closer look at MP3tunes, also see our in-depth review of the service from earlier this year. MP3tunes currently offers all of its users free 2GB music lockers, but the company is in the process of upgrading all of these accounts to 10GB of free storage. For $4.95 per month, users can also expand their lockers to 50GB.
Competitors: Other Music Lockers and Streaming Music Services
Apple is rumored to be launching an online version of iTunes in the near future, though the chances that Apple will offer users the ability to wirelessly sync this music with an Android phone are rather slim. Other MP3tunes competitors include MeCanto, which offers streaming to Android and Symbian phones, and pSonar, which offers unlimited storage but doesn’t offer mobile streaming or downloads.
In addition, the growing popularity of streaming music services like MOG and Rdio also poses a number of challenges for music locker services like MP3tunes. Some of these – like Rdio – already scan their users’ library for music that is also available on their services and then make these songs easily available on their services without forcing users to upload their complete music library. This was one of the features that made Lala so popular, though it remains to be seen if Apple plans to offer a similar service once it relaunches Lala.
