News - 19/03/2015

Microsoft’s OneDrive becomes a music locker for Xbox Music users

Microsoft’s OneDrive becomes a music locker for Xbox Music users

It turns out that music lockers are not on their way out just yet. Google recently upped the antes by offering to store 50,000 tracks for free, and Microsoft is now joining the space by offering the ability for users to upload and access music stored on the company’s OneDrive cloud solution via the Xbox Music service.

This effectively offers an option similar to that afforded by Google Play Music All Access, whereby users can “mix and match” between tracks that are available on their own library and tracks streamed from the on-demand service. 

Interestingly though, whilst Google opted not to make those music files readily accessible on Google Drive, Microsoft will leave the door open for users to get hold of them right on the OneDrive. 

The catch is that for now you won’t be able to listen to the music stored on OneDrive via Android or iOS - just Xbox Music on Windows 8.1, the web the Xbox. This is a big issue especially for those who are already paying $10 per month towards the service and hopefully support for other mobile devices is on its way.

In addition, it looks like Microsoft is actually going to upload every single track on the OneDrive, rather than trying to mix and match tracks on your drive with those already stored on their systems. This is likely to be due to licensing reasons, and also to the fact that Microsoft wants its users to be able to re-download the files on a permanent basis, something that is not currently possible with either iTunes Match or Google Play Music. 

If you’re not an Xbox Music subscriber you will still be able to user the service - it’s free - though you better watch out as you won’t be getting any extra space for storage on OneDrive and every song will count towards your allowance. 

Current Xbox Music subscribers on the other hand will receive an extra 100GB of storage which should be plenty even for remarkably large music collections.

Spotify has steered clear of this type of offering to this day, limiting the user interaction with MP3 collections the local management and sync of such collections via the desktop app. Obviously, the company can't compete with Google and Microsoft when it comes to offering free storage space to users, and there are some thorny licensing issues that come up when offering to store and provide access to copyrighted material, but as some artists continue to window their releases or opt out of streaming altogether it would be interesting to see it develop a locker that can detect which songs in a user's collection are not available on Spotify and just sync those.

 

(Andrea Leonelli) 

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