Best Buy launches ‘Music Cloud,’ iOS devices second-class citizens

The electronics peddler Best Buy has jumped on the cloud music bandwagon, unveiling its “Music Cloud” service this morning.

The music service is similar to Amazon or Google’s offerings, but with a client that runs on the Mac and the PC, which will keep the Music Cloud up-to-date with local music and playlists. Users can download an application to their an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry that allow them to stream music to the device and cache files for offline playback, for $4/month. The web-based player is free.

While the iOS app is not available at the time of this writing, Best Buy includes this footnote on its site:

Premium service is not available on Apple devices.

While we will have to wait to see the app in action, it appears that iOS users will just be able to stream music, but not have offline access to files. Offline caching is possible with iOS, of course, as apps such as Instacast and Rdio offer it.

Article Via Boy Genius Reports

Stephen Hackett, formerly a Lead Mac Genius at Apple, now spends his days running the IT department of a large non-profit in Memphis, TN. He writes about Apple, design and journalism at forkbombr.net. Like all twenty-somethings, you can find him… Full Bio