Can Apple compete with Google and Amazon?

Apple’s new web-hosted music service, which is expected to beat the market of Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, may have to face tough competition.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobes is about to announce the launch of iCloud, a cloud-based music service which will allow iPhone users to stream music from their personal iTunes collections to their phones. This follows the recent offers from Google and Amazon allowing cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users.

Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player allow the users to upload song collection to Google and Amazon server and keep it in sync. By installing Android app, a music player which connects to your cloud-stored collection can stream it to your phone.

Google Music automatically uploads the iTune library along with playlist, song count and song ratings. Google lets you store up to 20,000 songs for free.

Google’s loopholes are, they don’t sell music. Amazon has the upper hand here, because any digital music bought on Amazon is instantly available in your Amazon Cloud Drive, and stored for free.

Amazon, like Apple has a big catalogue of music which the company sells for around a dollar per track. They also offer 20 gigabytes of free storage for a year.

Apple’s iCloud is rumored to have an initial free period for iTunes Music Store customers, but the company plans to eventually charge a $25 a year subscription fee. Apple would also sell advertising around its iCloud service, reports said.

If Apple offers the cloud music service only to the iPhones, iPads and iPod touch users, the company will lock out Android users, who nowadays outnumber iPhone owners and have more choices in phones, wireless carriers, and data plans to cover all the streaming.