Winner: Amazon Cloud Drive

Design/Usability

Aesthetically, I preferred Amazon's app over mSpot's. Amazon MP3 was extremely easy to use and looked great as well. Buttons were easy to press, album art looked gorgeous, and moving between the player and the store was seamless. However, mSpot's method of uploading music to the cloud was relatively hassle-free: You designate a folder on your desktop to sync to the cloud, and any music that you add or remove from that folder gets updated in your mSpot account. So if you sync your iTunes music folder, all of your songs, ratings, playlists, and album art become available wherever you go.

If you want to update the music in your Cloud Drive, you'll have to do it manually. You can upload multiple songs at once, but you must upload any new music you get (other than by buying it from Amazon's MP3 store) from your computer. Another downside of Amazon's service is that it requires Flash to access, so iOS devices (like the iPhone and iPad) and older Android phones (running 2.1 and older) can't access the Cloud Drive or Player from their mobile browsers. The mSpot Website is universally accessible and the service offers a separate app for iPhones and iPads.

Winner: mSpot Music