mSpot’s Streaming Cloud Music is Hot – On Android

Wired.com

Streaming music is turning out to be popular for Android users, as the mSpot music service is reporting Thursday that its mobile music streaming app for Android has been downloaded over half a million times since it launched in early summer.

Users have been limited to 2GB of free storage – a not-miserly 1600 songs, but now mSpot is offering cloud storage of up to 40GB of music – about 32,000 songs – for $4 a month.

The company allows people to upload their music — be it purchased, ripped or downloaded for free — and play it from any Mac, Windows or Google Android device. mSpot’s model avoids the stumbling blocks of licensing deals which have repeatedly delayed the release of a U.S. version of Spotify — a paid, streaming music service that’s immensely popular in Europe.

Others — including MP3Tunes — have tried a similar approach only to be hit with copyright lawsuits from record labels, but mSpot says it has the labels’ blessings. That’s despite not paying them a dime in licensing costs for the service.

The way it works is simple: Rather than trying to recognize the music files on your computer and replicate them in the cloud, (inviting licensing issues with the labels), mSpot literally uploads your music collection from iTunes, Windows Media Player, and/or any folders you specify — maintaining any ratings and metadata you may have set up in iTunes by scanning its XML database. The upload process takes at least several hours depending on processing power and connection speed. From there, mSpot converts your music to streamable 48-Kbps aacplus files, and you’re good to go.

You can choose to download some of the music to your Android 2.0+ powered device – so that it can be played without a strong connection – or choose to only stream music.

Apple bought and shuttered a similar service called LaLa earlier this year. While many expected some sort of cloud-based music service to be integrated into iTunes, there was no hint of it in the new iTunes launched in early September.

mSpot on Android is also now taking advantage of Google’s voice commands on Android, so users can pick a song or an artist by voice and immediately have it start playing. It’s pretty sweet to be able to order your phone to “Listen to David Bowie” and have it search out the songs on your device or in the cloud.

September 23rd, 2010

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