Last year, Amazon introduced their music streaming service, Cloud Player. Amazon had beaten both Google (News - Alert) and Apple to the punch here in terms of music streaming offerings. The service would allow users to buy songs from Amazon and store them on the Cloud Drive or even upload their own music albums to the Cloud Drive, which could then be accessed from most internet browsers and Android (News - Alert) phones at the time.

Now, Amazon has expanded their audience further with the introduction of a Cloud Player app for the iPhone (News - Alert). The app is available for free and will work with any iPhone or iPod Touch running iOS 4.3 or later. The service itself is free with an initial 5 GB of storage, but should you need the extra space additional storage can be purchased beginning at 20 GB for $20 a year.

At this point though, Amazon’s move may be in vain. Amazon had an upper hand when they first announced Cloud Player because their competitors didn’t have any cloud music streaming service. Now, Google with Google Music and Apple’s (News - Alert) integration of the iCloud, that isn’t the case. Although some iPhone users may shift their music libraries to Cloud Player, I don’t expect there to be a mad exodus from iTunes. Most Apple users will have a similar mindset to mine which is “Why?” With iCloud in place, most iPhone owners will be comfortable accessing their music as they always have and don’t see any point in uploading it to another cloud access point. And should we want a music streaming service there are plenty of third party services like Pandora (News - Alert), which are great because they offer something different in that you don’t need to buy music and can be introduced to new music.

Although it’s nice that Amazon finally has opened Cloud Player’s doors to iOS users, they are going to need to make it much more enticing if they want people to switch over from the de facto iTunes.