Amazon offers unlimited music space

digital store and access to music stored on an iPad, reports Rolling Stone.

The retail giant says the expanded service is to encourage early adopters to stick with Amazon's cloud storage rather than switch over to similar services such as Google's Music Beta or Apple's iCloud, which is expected to be unveiled later this year.

PC Mag reveals that Amazon introduced its Cloud Player application in March this year - a companion to the Amazon Cloud Drive.

At the time, the service offered up to 5GB of free, online music storage, expandable to 20GB with the purchase of an MP3 album at the Amazon Music Store.

Amazon has also released Cloud Player for the iPad, which lets users play back music that they've stored on the Web, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon, Google and Apple are racing to offer entertainment via cloud computing, which delivers streaming media over the Internet, rather than requiring users to keep it on their hard drives.

Record companies also have struck licensing deals with existing music-streaming sites, such as Spotify, Rdio. and Music Unlimited. After years of piracy and declining compact-disc sales, the music industry is counting on cloud services to help them rebound.