Amazon Cloud Player: make sure you take advantage of their introductory offer

I just purchased an MP3 album "Johnny Winter And / Live" for $5 and got a $20 one year upgrade of 20 GB of cloud storage - a sweet deal, but considering that you always get 5 GB free this may not be much of an added value. Amazon has a nifty uploader application that looked at my iTunes MP3s and playlists and is cloning that on Amazon Cloud Player automatically. My entire iTunes library will only take up a few GBs after it is automatically uploaded. Sometimes Amazon kills Apple's iTunes store on price: I was about to buy a few tracks on iTunes last year and then realized I could buy the entire album as MP3 on Amazon for for not much more.

Amazon seems to be investing in introductory offers like the upgrade for Cloud Player and the first time AWS developer's package (basically free to develop and deploy for one year). Certainly expensive for them to provide as free services but Amazon is playing the long game. My ordered list of the most impressive technology companies:

• Amazon

• Google

• Apple

• Netflix

Notice that Microsoft is not on my list :-)