Best Buy to Launch Music Streaming Cloud Service in U.S. This Year

The world’s largest consumer electronics retailer in the world, Best Buy Co. Inc., will launch a new cloud-based music service, Music Cloud, in the United States, which will directly compete against a number of new cloud products from top competitors including Amazon’s, Google’s, and Apple’s cloud products.

Best Buy already operates a cloud-based music service in the United Kingdom, My Music Anywhere UK, which allows consumers to stream their media files through the cloud to a variety of supported devices, including the Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry devices, and Google Android devices, among others.

Best Buy plans to expand My Music Anywhere to the United States as a rebranded product under the “Music Cloud” name. Sources that spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans were private, said the service would launch by the end of this year.

Best Buy has secured agreements with a number of record labels, including Sony Universal, EMI, and Warner Music, among others.

More than 6-million titles are already part of the Music Cloud library, and the service will even allow users to upload songs that are not already available in the cloud.

Consumers also have the option to purchase music directly from Best Buy Music Cloud, with the tracks automatically syncing with the cloud service.

The news comes as the popular European music service, Spotify, just closed a massive $100-million round of venture capital financing, a round that was led by Accel Ventures, DST, among other investors, valuing the company at $1-billion.

Spotify is widely believed to launch in the United States by the end of this year as the company has already secured agreements with three of the top four record labels in the U.S.

Although Spotify launched in Europe well over a year ago, the service could have been a viable competitor against iTunes as it offered a number of added features, including the ability to upload music to the cloud – however, that opportunity now seems to have all but passed with the Apple iCloud announcement.

The streaming media cloud market place has very quickly become saturated with products from top tech companies, including Amazon, Google (see our previous coverage of Google Music), Apple, Microsoft, among other smaller players, including Spotify, and now most recently, Best Buy.

The Best Buy stock (NYSE:BBY) closed up 330 basis points to close out this week’s trading at $31.01 per share.