Microsoft Adding Music Playback Capabilities to SkyDrive

According to a LiveSide published report, Microsoft is making preparations to utilize its SkyDrive.com cloud storage as the service to deliver Xbox Music with multiple platform support.

Adding the ability for music playback to SkyDrive.com enhances its capabilities, naturally, but could also have a very positive effect for the Xbox Music service as well. As TNW noted some time past, cross-platform support as part of Xbox Music is key, and lacking.

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This might help push Xbox music, but I think that if they want to push that brand even further they're going to need off line music support and at least a PC client where you can side load music to an android or iOS device.

I'd use this over iTunes any day, assuming I used Microsoft anything. (waits for heatlesssun's sneak attack)
Actually this is a pretty smart move by Microsoft, hopefully it ends up going through.

Got to see if they can stream flac, google music doesn't.

I like my Amazon Drive. For $20 a year I get like 20GB of space, but music does not count towards that. So I was able to have a remote backup of my 60GB of music and still using 0% of my 20GB. Plus they have a music player for IOS and Android. Which means when I get the urge to listen to some obscure song in my collection thats not on my devices, I still have access to it.

RIAA wont like this...

They should change the branding. It still sounds like a console only music program (which would be a stupid idea).

There is some confusion in this.

Scan and match: There is no storage involved in this. This will just make links in your Music share that says you can play this, much like a shortcut to streaming the song (possibly download rights [DRMed]) too but nothing big at all)

It then jumps to "Content not in the Xbox music catalog" This they'd need storage for because they'd have to upload every copy.

I am worried that your storage is going to depend on your live drive, erm I mean sky drive subscription, yet another thing to pay for.

I will also have to gripe that one of the things that Zune had that this new service doesn't (besides all the social features I found heavily useful right when the ripped them away) is that it has a web portal for playback and advanced searching. I could pull up any browser supporting Silverlight and stream my pass and look up content by more than just a general search.