Best Buy Releases Their Own Music Cloud

thewebblogger writes "In a move that more resembles 'me too' behavior rather than a well planned release, Best Buy has announced their own music cloud service, called simply Best Buy Music Cloud. The functionality is not complete yet; iOS / Android applications are not available at this point, and the only part that works is the Web Player. The premium version will cost $3.99/month and you'll have to upload your own music. iTunes is mandatory."

Best Buy + iTunes?

[DogDude]

Wow. That's like a shit sandwich. The worst retailer with the worst music software. Where do I sign up?

Business strategy

[Albanach]

This sounds a lot like a way to add on a $3.99 recurring charge to new PC sales for Best Buy. I'd expect to see them pushing this heavily in store with new computer sales, and a lot of folk buying it then never using it. Allow cancelling only by telephone and only after waiting 20 minutes in a phone queue and that should keep their retention rate nice and high.

Re:In 10 years time people will be saying..

[mlts]

Bingo. A few years back, we had some decent choices for a MP3 player with a decent capacity, from the Zune, to many others. Drivers? Plug it in, it mounts as a USB flash drive, copy files, unmount, and call it done.

Now, there are no real MP3 players with any capacity beyond like 6 gig, and the only MP3 player with 100+ gigs of capacity is the iPod Classic.

Of course, like described above, there are the "portable media players", but if I want to watch video on my MP3 player, I would buy a Galaxy Tab, iPad, or an iPod Touch. There is a market niche for this type of device -- just audio and a high capacity HDD. I just hope Apple doesn't can their iPod Classic anytime soon.

Re:Dead on Arrival!

[c0lo]

Zombie on arrival. It will be included in the crapware installed on every computer the "innocent" people buy from them and the opt-out will be painful.

Re:In 10 years time people will be saying..

[Darkness404]

Right, and in a day where flash memory is dirt cheap, accessing the web on a device is getting harder and harder to do (no more cell phone unlimited data, fewer unsecured wi-fi hotspots) and you can get streaming music for free (Pandora, Last.Fm, YouTube, Shoutcast, etc.), why does it make sense for you to pay $4 to access your own music?

Perhaps 5 years ago "the cloud" might have made sense back when 2 GB SD cards were still $50-60, unsecured Wi-Fi was incredibly common and data plans were unlimited, but today with dirt cheap flash media prices with enough storage to hold lots of songs it really makes no sense.