Amazon has launched their cloud-based music app in three new countries. Music aficionados in Germany, the UK and France can now upload their music to Amazon’s servers and then stream the music to virtually any device with a web browser.

The Amazon Cloud Player iOS app is also now available in those three countries, thus giving Amazon even more places in the world where the retail giant competes with Apple.

Note that you’ll have to upload the music before you can play it, a process that is designed to be as simple as possible. Space is limited to 250 songs (in addition to the ones bought from Amazon), but if you upgrade to the premium service the limit will be increased to 250,000 songs.

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This music streaming service has had a rocky history of late and earlier this year it was booted from Google Play because of some less than clearly licensed which Grooveshark was offering to customers.

What sets Grooveshark is that users can upload music and listen to it as well as share it. Naturally this upset most every record label, and it will likely continue to bother them.

But the Grooveshark app is back in the Google Play Store today, and the company is boasting that they’ve rebuilt the app from the ground up as well worked out deals with the major labels.

“After working closely with Google to get rogue apps removed, we’re delighted that the official Grooveshark app has been reinstated in the Android market. Grooveshark is dedicated to helping music fans search, discover and share music while pioneering new artist promotion, distribution and monetization techniques. We look forward to continuing to build a relationship with Android and leverage this fantastic platform for our partners.”

The app is free, and so is the basic service. There’s also an on-demand option which costs $9 a month.

via Phandroid

Amazon might still be in a distant second place to iTunes in the music market, but today is the day that will stat to change.

Amazon’s just announced an update to their cloud music app. Cloud Player has always been able to play your music, and now Amazon is saving you the effort of uploading it. You can now use the app to scan the iTunes on your computer and have Amazon build a list of all the songs you own. You can then play those songs on the Cloud Player apps for Android and iOS as well as on the Kindle Fire. Read more

Spotify has hit 15 million active users just on the strength of its iOS apps, and now that Android users can listen for free that number is going to shoot up.

The subscription music service announced today its Android app was finally getting the one feature that accounted for 11 million Spotify users: free music. The app has been updated with a new listening option that removes the need to pay for the subscription. You’ll have to deal with ads, but that is the cost of a free service, of course.

TechCrunch has more details:

As for why the long-awaited feature is only now making its way to Android, product manager Donovan Sung noted that it was an issue of balancing priorities. According to him, one of the reasons Radio for Android spent an extra month in the oven was because the team was “focused on making the Android app a lot better” first.

Spotify is now up to over 15 million active users, with over 4 million  of them paying for a subscription, according to Ken Parks, Spotify’s chief content officer. That’s a significant increase since last September, when they reported having 2 million subscribers.

You can find the app in Google Play.

AOL has just announced that their music app, “You’ve Got Music” will soon be available for the Kindle Fire.

I kid. The real name of the app is AOL Play, and like the many social music apps it lets users listen to their own music as well as from an extensive collection of free songs and albums.  Users can also stream music from over 50,000 SHOUTcast radio stations.

According to AOL senior director Sol Lipman the app looks particularly good on Amazon’s tablet:

“The Kindle Fire can’t get much more awesome, but somehow we made beautiful babies together with PLAY. It’s the best social music experience on the Fire, and I say that because I’m only mostly unbiased. Look, just stop reading and go try it.”

Now, the app isn’t live yet in the Amazon Appstore, but when it is you’ll be able to add your own album notes, share your favorite tracks with your friends, and even connect to your existing network through Twitter or Facebook.

• Amazon Appstore

You can also find the app in iTunes and Google Play.

via TNW

When Microsoft released the original Xbox a decade ago hackers immediately set upon the goal of turning the game console into a media player.  A number of different hacks were released, and one of the better ones was XBMC.

XBMC was so popular and worked so well new versions were released for computers running Windows, Linux, and OSX. And pretty soon there will be a new version of XBMC which can run on Android.

It’s still in the early development phase, but the developers are already sharing their work: Read more

Spotify has been working on their Android app for some time now but ti has always been a disappointment for an toehrwise stellar service. Today that changes.

They’ve just released a new version of their app, and early reports are saying good things about it. The app includes support for Android 4.0 as well as a complete redesign with all new navigation options.

Other new features include:

• Even more social – check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
• Artist imagery in high resolution
• Related artist view – available for the first time on mobile
• ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320kbps listening
• So much faster!
• Play queue
• Last.fm scrobbling
• Crossfade/gapless playback settings
• Widget – control Spotify from the home screen
• Folder support

You can find the app in Google Play.

via

If Pandora and Spotify aren’t your thing then eMusic’s new app might appeal to you. The oldie but goodie music subscription service has just released an Android app. It works with your existing eMusic account and offers access to curated radio stations, music recommendations, playlist mixes and MP3 downloads .Users will also get to read reviews and liner notes from albums as well as contribute their own opinions.

The app is available now in Google Play. It has pretty hefty hardware requirements (Android v2.3.3 or newer with at least 1GHz and 576MB RAM) so I’m not sure how many will end up using it.

Spotify is currently testing a new version of their Android app and it’s available for download right now.

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