Amazon's Cloud Music Player Available Now in the UK, France and Germany

Amazon's Cloud Player, which offers to store your music in the cloud and make it accessible everywhere, is now expanding outside of the US and into the UK, France and Germany.

The move makes sense as Amazon is increasing its digital offerings in Europe, those countries in particular.

Amazon's Cloud Player is tied into Cloud Storage, its cloud-based sync and storage service, and started out as a free service.

Initially, it had no license from any music label and users had to manually upload all of their songs, which was slow for thousands of songs.

Now though, you only get to store 250 songs for free, but you can get an upgrade to 250,000 songs for $24.99 a year. This way, all of your songs are matched against Amazon's huge database and are added to your online library without having to upload them.

That's on par with what Apple asks for its iTunes Match service. Google offers a similar service for free, with a limit of 20,000 songs.

Amazon's service is the only one available in these new European countries, so which one is best is a moot point. Amazon's MP3 store is also open in these countries, so the tie-in is obvious.

In fact, it's the reason the Cloud Player is being introduced here in the first place. Any song purchased from the MP3 Store doesn't count towards your limit.

With the Kindle Fire HD being made available in several European countries, a bigger offering on the digital front is an obvious necessity for Amazon.

The big 8.9 inch Kindle Fire HD is still only being made available in the US and the reason is simple, only that Amazon's video offerings are comprehensive enough to make selling the device at its current price point profitable.