Google Ups Free Music Storage Limit On Cloud To 50,000 Songs

(RTTNews) - Are you a music buff? Google's recent announcement should sound music to your ears. The search giant has bumped up its music storage limit for Google Play Music users by 30,000, effective immediately. The users will now be able to store up to 50,000 of their personal favorite songs on Google's cloud music storage for free, sharply up from the previous limit of 20,000 songs.

Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again.

In a post on its official blog, the company wrote that the songs can be uploaded directly from the user's iTunes collection or from other local music folders. It can then be streamed or downloaded and played on the web itself, desktop computers or Chromecast as well as smartphones or tablets running Android or iOS.

This is a big boost for music lovers but spells out a threat to its music streaming competitors. Apple allows its users to upload only half the number of songs on the cloud with iTunes Match, but at a annual fee of $24.99.

Amazon allows its users to upload and store only a meager 250 songs for free, but it can go up to a hefty 250,000 songs for subscribers at a price of $24.99.

The Google Play Music All Access service also provides ad-free access to 30 millions songs through a paid subscription of $9.99 per month. The service is a strong competitor music-streaming services like Spotify Ltd. and and Pandora Media Inc. (P).

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Xbox Music service does not allow manual uploads, but users can only sync and stream their own songs to the cloud if they are already in Microsoft's own store, but with advertisements.