Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably already heard about Amazon’s new music service: Amazon Cloud Player.  I won’t go into the details much, because you can the scoop straight from Amazon.

Consider this the cliff notes version of what you’re likely to encounter should you decide to give the service a try.  Of course, as of this post, the service is barely a day old and is likely to change quickly.

Pros:

• Amazon payment processing is super smooth (and so is 20GB storage upgrade if you buy an album)
• Amazon music store integration
• Cloud player for web works flawlessly
• Appears to do a good job syncing playlists and music (has pushed 10GB to my cloud drive in 1 day)
• Amount of web storage is best bang for buck vs competing services like mSpot

Cons:

• Android cloud player app has major streaming issues (mSpot performs fine on same phone in same area)
• Android cloud player, even when streaming works, appears to hang and won’t skip/play music
• Encountered several force close issues too

I use Amazon services a lot.  I’m not joking when I say I purchase something from them at least monthly, if not more frequently.  I’ve been purchasing DRM free music from Amazon for a very long time.  I feel sorry for people who don’t already buy their music from Amazon.  I’m guessing a majority of those people are Apple users who are stuck with iTunes…sucks to be you, but I digress.

I was already buying my music from Amazon, and now they’ve just made it easier to manage my purchases and allowed for streaming my own music collection anywhere.  I think this is a big win for people already buying Amazon music, and an especially big win if you have an Android or Blackberry mobile device.

Now, don’t go thinking everything is roses.  For starters, the cloud player on my Droid 2 Global (Verizon) will not even stream over 3G; even with full signal.  Not to mention, that even wi-fi streaming had plenty of issues.  Even when it does try to stream a song, the player won’t play another and seems to hang or freeze and becomes inoperable.  I’ve looked at the reviews on the Android Market and there are plenty of other people reporting the same issue.  I’ve seen a few folks say things like “stop blaming Amazon because you don’t have signal” , or “just cause you don’t know how to make it work”, etc.  Of course, those people are likely even less tech savvy then those they are criticizing, but again, I digress.

At first, I thought maybe I was having signal or device issues local to my personal situation.  Then, I fired up mSpot, and all was right with the world.  Yes, mSpot worked perfectly fine in the same area, on the same device, streaming the same music.  I’ve never had a streaming problem like this with mSpot in the past few months since I started using their service.  Clearly, Amazon has some kinks to work out with streaming, especially 3G streaming.

Overall, I would highly recommend the Amazon service as it’s only going to get better.  Once they figure out the streaming issue for devices, they’ll be the hands down favorite in streaming personal music.  I’ll go on record now to say that, if they do fix the streaming issues, I’ll cancel my mSpot subscription.  Not because I don’t like mSpot, but because Amazon’s prices are much more competitive, the tight integration with the Amazon music store, and my Amazon account in general.  I’ll try to provide a follow-up post after the service has been live for awhile and some of the issues have been resolved.