With more people enjoying the benefits of listening to music in the cloud, it’s about time to see what cloud services came up with to keep their subscribers happy.

Spotify

The Swedish music streaming service recently announced two new desktop upgrade features: the Gapless playback and crossfade features.

Gapless playback lets the songs flow seamlessly, one to the next, without any silent spaces in-between, while crossfade allows fading out one song as you bring another in.  Both are perfect for keeping parties rockin’.

Other features include:

• Gapless playback (‘on’ by default)
• Crossfade support (turn ‘on’ via Preferences)
• Faster artist browsing
• Better sorting of albums & top hits
• New save and restore feature for ‘Now Playing’
• Improved Subscribe, Buddy List and Favourites options
• Drag & drop fixed on Windows
• ‘Hide purchase buttons’ option (Premium users only)
• ‘Offline Mode’ via Spotify menu

Cloud Music Sniper

Google Music launched in November of last year, giving Fandroids their own centralized alternative for iOS’s iTunes platform.  But it has a major flaw: music can only be accessed using the official Google Music app.

But the exclusivity issue was addressed by R2DoesInc’s Cloud Music Sniper – an app that allows any application to access locally stored songs from Google Music, as long as they’ve been downloaded into your Android devices’ internal storage or SD card.  Aside from that, the app is said to be so powerful that users can take their music off their handset once it has been “sniped” and then play that music on any desktop music program without any problems.

The Cloud Music Sniper is available in the Android Market for $1.99.

Akazoo 2.0

InternetQ, one of the leading providers of mobile marketing and digital entertainment solutions, is showing off Akazoo 2.0, their social music platform for operators at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Akazoo 2.0 is a multi-channel platform that allows mobile users to share, download, play and access both local and international music, without the need for a credit card.

Akazoo users can store their content and access it across multiple mobile devices and PCs via the cloud. To listen to music on the move, users can simply sync their Akazoo online music library through the cloud to their Akazoo mobile app. Users can also purchase tracks and albums from a social music store catalogue with 13 million tracks of all the major and local independent labels, become fans of an artist or share music items within their communities. The service is available via operators or directly to consumers.

“The new features we’ll be unveiling will further enhance the existing services, but our aim is to create an exciting social experience which merges social networking and digital media consumption. We’ve had great success so far and we’re expecting continued subscriber growth this year with a full roll-out of the service,” InternetQ CEO Konstantinos Korletis stated.

Apple

macotakara.jp reported that Apple’s cloud service is now available in Japan.  iOS users can now  access the “Purchase” tab within the iTunes Store application.  Users can also turn on automatic downloading of Music on their iOS devices, along with automatic downloads of applications and books.

“iTunes in the Cloud offers users the ability to re-download their content on a number of devices without the need to purchase it again,” said the Apple Insider report.  “It applies to music, applications and books that are bought through Apple.”