Jonathan Seff from TechHive:

Cloud Player now provides free access to all past and future Amazon MP3 purchases (similar to Apple’s iTunes in the Cloud feature). Where things get interesting is that Amazon can also scan your iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and match the songs on your Mac or Windows PC with those in Amazon’s 20-million-song catalog.

Songs that are matched don’t need to be uploaded, which saves you lots of time and bandwidth getting your music collection in the cloud, and matched tracks are upgraded to 256-kbps MP3 files. This is all thanks to licensing agreements reached with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and more than 150 independent distributors, aggregators, and music publishers.

Interesting and smart move by Amazon. I’m glad there’s something else out there that has some feature parity with iTunes match. Especially since it’s not that great in my opinion. This should help push both services forward as they attempt to compete with each other.