TheStreet

Tech Trends

This has been a very busy day, so far, for online music streaming services. Three biggies have announced some new and improved features – all of which seem to benefit the end user.

Amazon has announced agreements with Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal as well as 150 independent distributors and music publishers to bring Scan and match services to their Amazon Cloud Player software.

From now on, Amazon Music download purchases will automatically be saved to a customer's Amazon Cloud account. Amazon promises to match your iTunes and Windows Media Player songs and makes all of those files instantly available in the Amazon Cloud Player. Plus, those files will be able to be played on the Kindle Fire, or any Android device, iPhone, iPad touch, Web browser and soon Sonos or Roku boxes.

You can store 250 songs for free in Amazon's Cloud or 250,000 songs for $25 a year.

Spotify reportedly now have four million paying customers and a total of 15 million fans who listen for free (but they have to suffer through advertisements every now and then).

They also want everyone to know that their Spotify Radio feeds are now available for iOS and Android users as part of their downloadable software. Price to listen? Zero. It's free.

And, Samsung wants it to be known that they're launching their “all-in-one” Music Hub in the United States. And they're starting with offering it to Galaxy S-III smartphone owners.

They're making two versions available here. The freebie version allows users to access all the songs in the 7digital catalog, store music purchases in Samsung;s cloud and play those songs back via the Music Hub app.

Music Hub Premium also allows users to store songs in the cloud and play back on any device plus create custom “radio” streams, discover new music and lots more.

The Premium service is free for the first 30-days and $9.99 each month after that.