Best Buy's New Musical Cloud: Lost in the Fog

Best Buy has some serious guts. Months after launching its own movie streaming service against behemoth Netflix, the big box store has released Music Cloud that competes with, seemingly, everyone who has a cloud-based music service. Unfortunately, like its movie program, Music Cloud is both too late to make an impact and too limited to be successful.

Music Cloud lets you stream music from your library onto Apple (APPL) iOS, Google (GOOG) Android, and BlackBerry devices. You can also do limited offline playback, so there's no need to be online all the time to enjoy the music.

Way too crowded to matter
There are two big issues here. The most obvious one is that the cloud has become the most crowded airspace in 2011. Let's do a brief recap:

• February 2011: Amazon (AMZN) shows off Amazon Cloud Player, a website that will upload music, store it, and make it playable through the browser. It starts at $20/year, though a few gigs are offered for free with an Amazon digital music purchase.
• May 2011: Google offers Google Cloud Music, a free music service that lets users play their tunes on any web-enabled device.
• June 2011: Apple announces iCloud for all its multimedia. Users will be able to access their music, movies, and media on any Apple device with an Internet connection. The cloud service launches this fall at $99/year.

Amazon, Google, and Apple? Best Buy might have made a dent if its service came out, say, last summer, or even during the 2010 holiday season. A summer 2011 launch makes it virtually irrelevant. Best Buy had the same late-to-the-party strategy in 2009, when it announced a streaming movie service literally years after Netflix and Blockbuster (BBI), not to mention Hulu, Boxee, and other services. And, like the movie streaming service, I suspect everyone will forget about the Best Buy initiative within a few months.

Second, according to VentureBeat, Music Cloud only works with iTunes libraries. Per its standard m.o., Apple will only have its iCloud service compatible with iTunes, but both Amazon and Google currently allow you to play your music from any type of library. So Best Buy not only has the latest service, but it has one of the most limited, too.

Worse is that, unlike Apple, Best Buy doesn't benefit from focusing on Apple products. Apple will gain from customer loyalty by requiring iCloud users to stay within their iTunes software. Best Buy is more likely to have frustrated customers who don't expect a seemingly agnostic cloud music service to only work with one type of tech brand.

The best thing Best Buy can do? Pull the plug right now and let the bad Music Cloud program blow over.

Photo courtesy of InAweofGod'sCreation // CC 2.0
Related:

• Best Buy Spins its Wheels in the Digital Movie Download Game
• Apple's Music-Cloud Negotiations Put Amazon, Google Way Down in the Hole
• WWDC: Apple Blows an Opportunity to Change the World
• Google Cloud Music: Playing the Same Sad Song as Google TV, Google Books...
• Amazon Cloud Music: How Amazon is Forcing Apple to Update iTunes

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