Amazon announced a new service yesterday called Cloud Drive and an associated app called Cloud Player, which essentially lets a user store their music, photos, and movies on Amazon’s servers and stream it anywhere there’s an internet connection. This is what we’ve been promised for years, right? All of our stuff lives in “the cloud” and we get to access it from anywhere.
The interesting thing here is that Amazon hasn’t cleared any of this with the big music labels, who would love to make us all pay more for, uh, music we already bought. From a great paidContent article:
The company tells paidContent: “We do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive. The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”
I have to hand it to Amazon—that’s a mighty big gamble they’re taking, but it’s fantastic for us consumers for three reasons:
- Like I said above, we (hopefully) already bought the music we’re storing with them. Why should we have to pay another fee simply to access it?
- A worthy competitor to iTunes is good for everyone—the artists, Apple, Amazon, and consumers. Amazon has been one of the only other companies out there that seems to get this stuff, and it looks like they’re getting smarter.
- Jetpacks can’t be far behind.