Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player…

Finally it is Amazon who makes the first move. After the myriad of rumors, topped-up by the Benjamin Corollary, we finally have a legitimate cloud-music solution, and it is not by Apple.

The exclusion of iOS compatibility (for now) is not really significant, in my opinion. If it proves to be a profitable service, Amazon will want to drive some music purchases away from iTunes, and for that they need to reach the millions of iOS users out there. There’s already a workaround to play the songs through Mobile Safari, and 10 bucks say an iOS version of the Cloud Player app will be announced shortly.

For those of you who have access to Spotify, remember that this is a service in which you actually own your music, and don’t just pay for access to it. It’s easy to overlook that difference, but it is an important one.