Amazon launches online media storage service

By Rachel Metz, AP Technology Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Amazon.com wants to be more than a destination for shopping online — it also dreams of being a place where you can store your music, photos and videos and access them any time, from any computer.

The online retailer launched two new offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The first lets you upload and store files like music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers, which you can get to from a Web browser on a Mac or PC. The second lets you play songs you've uploaded on your computer or on a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software. The "cloud" in the services' names refers to the practice of storing content online and streaming it to a computer over the Internet.

Amazon's move is beating Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which are believed to be working on similar services that would allow consumers to access their content when away from their home computer.

While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it's offering anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage. That's less space than you'd get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it's a move that's likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to pay for more storage space.

The Seattle-based company, which already runs an online storage service for companies called Amazon S3, decided to roll out a consumer cloud service to make it easier for customers to access digital content no matter where they are, Amazon music director Craig Pape said.

The offerings could also benefit Amazon's bottom line: The company realized customers were hesitant to purchase MP3s at work because they didn't want them tied to their office computer, Pape said, so Cloud Drive and Cloud Player may drive more impulse music shopping.

"At the end of the day we're trying to delight customers, but we're trying to sell more music, too," he said.

The company also wants to sell cloud storage. If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $20 (and this includes the 5 free GB). For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3 store.

Documents or videos you've uploaded to Cloud Drive will open with programs on the computer you're using, Pape said, while songs in MP3 or AAC files will be playable through the Web-based Cloud Player.

The player offers simple controls — you can play, pause or skip tracks, or build your own playlists. For users who want to listen while on the go, an updated version of the Amazon MP3 digital music-buying app will include Cloud Player, letting users play music they've stored with Amazon's service on their cell phone as well as tunes that are already on their handsets.

Very interesting. Talk about a killer app for Android devices.

Typically, Warner is pissed:

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/03/ ... ayer-.html

And Old Media goes crumbling down.

I love how they want to charge fees for people storing and playing their already purchased music. Greed will eventually kill the luddites off.

Will Amazon cloud service rain on Apple's parade?

Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek
04/04/11



Here's how effortless it is to move your digital music collection from Apple's iTunes software to Amazon's new Cloud Drive music service:

1. Visit Amazon.com, enter your user name and password, and find the link that says "upload files."

2. Agree to the terms of service and solve a Captcha, one of those tricky image-recognition puzzles that prove you're an human being.

3. Download Amazon's MP3 uploader software, which scans the music on your hard drive.

4. Select about 1,000 of the gazillion songs you own and mark them for upload.

5. Wait around six hours for the upload to finish.

6. Download Amazon's separate Cloud Player app for Android to stream that music to your phone, or use a Web browser to listen to it from any PC.

Sounds easy, right?

Welcome to the awkward stage of the digital music revolution. Online song sales have stagnated, depriving the endangered music industry of one of its last remaining lifelines. Yet digital music continues to be a vital battleground for Google, Apple and Amazon to try to lure users to their other devices and online offerings.

Now, Jeff Bezos & Co. have boldly tried to leapfrog Google and Apple in the quest to liberate people from the decade-old practice of buying and downloading digital songs to a computer and then manually transferring them between devices.

The idea behind "cloud music" is to let people stream their music collections from the Web to any computer or device. Analysts believe such services are inevitable - even if Amazon stumbles.

"Having access to your music on all your devices has to be the starting point of any next-generation music service and product," said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research.

That's the vision, but right now, the convoluted uploading process is the result of key trade-offs Amazon made to get to the cloud music market before its rivals.

Licensing deals

First, major labels want new licensing arrangements for cloud services and a bigger cut of the online music pie. Their demands have slowed down the introduction of cloud music features, and Amazon designed its service without their permission, instigating a wave of complaints from Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

"We're disappointed by their decision to launch without a license," said Brian Garrity, a spokesman for Sony.

Bill Carr, Amazon's vice president for music and movies, claims Amazon "highly values" its relationship with the labels, but compares uploading songs to the legally harmless practice of attaching a hard drive to your PC and transferring music files to it.

Amazon primarily designed a service to comply with copyright laws - not to make shifting music to the cloud seamless. Amazon requires users to upload their own copies of songs that it could more easily supply from its digital store. Services like MyPlay and Mp3tunes have tried the same basic approach over the years. None attracted many users.

Amazon, which controls only about 13 percent of the digital music market despite four years of battling iTunes, apparently believes it has unique advantages in the coming cloud music battle.

Thanks to the massive server capacity backing its successful cloud computing business, in which it rents computing power to other companies, Amazon can offer its streaming music users 5 gigabytes of music storage for free, or 20 GB if they buy just one album from Amazon. The company is also prominently advertising the service on its home page.

"We observed from our other digital media businesses that buy-once, play-anywhere really resonates with consumers," Carr said.

The service Amazon released last week has been criticized for being difficult to use and incompatible with Apple iPads and iPhones.

Not social

"There's nothing social about it. How can you launch anything on the Web today that doesn't integrate social?" said David Pakman, the former chief executive of eMusic and a partner at Palo Alto venture capital firm Venrock.

David Hyman, founder of Berkeley music subscription service Mog, says of Amazon's cloud offering: "It's a stepping-stone. This is Amazon putting its feet in and testing the waters."

So what does the future of cloud music look like? Google, Apple or Amazon might finally get the major-label licenses that will allow them to make storing music collections in the cloud seamless for users. (Instead of uploading each song, the service could simply scan the names of songs in a collection and reproduce them in the cloud.) Or subscription music services such as Mog, Rdio and Rhapsody that offer unlimited access to a broad catalog of Web-based music for a monthly fee may find the mainstream success that has long eluded them.

Such an unlimited cloud music offering may be Amazon's ultimate goal; Carr doesn't rule out developing a music subscription service and offering it for free to members of Amazon Prime.

"This is an exciting Day One," he said of Cloud Drive. "We always have an open mind."

The article writer is exaggerating just to complain. It wasn't a hassle at all.

I have 474 CDs available from amazon for download onto its cloud service. I buy WAY too many CDs from amazon...