Music, Cloud Computing | featured news

Free digital copies of 50,000 CDs are being offered to Amazon customers via a service that stores the music in the cloud.

Steve Jobs’ appearance Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference to introduce three new software products for Apple will be closely scrutinized by everyone from investors in the company’s stock to obsessed Apple fans who want to know how the King of Cupertino’s health is faring. Jobs, who went on medical leave in January, left chief operating officer Tim Cook in place to run things on a day-to-day basis. At the conference Monday, he (along with a team of Apple executives) will be introducing two new operating system software programs, as well as announcing iCloud, a widely anticipated service that lets users store content online.

It has been rumored that Google will announce a cloud music offering at the Google I/O conference on Tuesday. It seems that the live beta of Google Music has already leaked online.You can visit Google's Music Beta page and sign in using your Gmail or Google profile credentials. There's not much you can do yet, but you can request an invitation for when the service is up and running.

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.