Windows Phone Already Does Play Music From The Cloud

Lately there's been a lot of interest in cloud-based music streaming services. You've got Amazon's Cloud Player and Google Music Beta as well as rumors of an Apple iTunes cloud music streaming service. Yesterday, when we asked about SkyDrive support in Mango, Pocketnow alumn, Derek Snyder showed us how you could access multiple folders in your SkyDrive account and easily open a 3rd party file type like PDF. He also showed us a folder with a music file in it, but didn't tap it to show how that would work. You might have seen that and thought, "Oh, can we play music off of that 25Gb free SkyDrive cloud storage?!" 

Guess what, you already can play MP3s from SharePoint 2010 based cloud storage document libraries (also see Using Office 365 with Windows Phone), so having that download from SkyDrive probably wouldn't be an issue. In the current implementation, it seems you can only play one song at a time, so don't expect to get full playlists right now. You also can't save cloud-stored songs to the music library on the phone. Of course all of that would seem fairly easy to change in Mango if Microsoft added a "SkyDrive" section to the music library. It certainly seems like it wouldn't be a big deal at all. 

Then again, if you're a Zune Pass user, this whole streaming music off of a cloud service probably sounds pretty useless to you since you've already got cloud-based streaming of over 11 million songs no matter where you are anyway.