Amazon Cloud Player is a smart offering
by Volker Weber
You can buy tracks from Amazon today. Which means, they have an instance of that track on their servers. You download a copy. If you use the Cloud Player, you can play that same track again from the same storage where your copy originated from. If a thousand people buy the same track, it adds a thousand links but not a thousand files. Instead of charging you a monthly fee for streaming, Amazon charges your for the tracks which you own and can play offline if you want. Only if you exceed your storage allowance, you pay more. And Amazon makes more money without adding significant cost. Everybody wins.
Who is losing? The music "industry" which still tries to emulate their physical distribution model. Next step? Artists publish to iTunes and Amazon.
Comments
Genius, and just as their retail and cloud infrastructure offerings were at launch, very forward thinking. I hope availability outside of the US isn't too far off.
....and as we speak the RIAA is lawyering up. I got a free MP3locker subscription a while back and never really bothered to use it because I presumed they'd be sued out of existence. Amazon though? This will be interesting.
Why do I actually need to upload my music?
99% percent of the music anyone has is probably available already on the servers of Amazon resp. on iTunes, so only an identfication record would have to be uploaded. Well, the free CC music isn´t there, but when 1 person uploads it, it is there too.
unfortunatelly with all services like amazon's cloudplayer that sound interesting there are some drawbacks if you happen to live outside the US. This is especially true if you live in Germany.
"It appears that you are attempting to use Amazon Cloud Player from outside the U.S. This service is intended for U.S. customers only."
I would love to legaly use this service or other services like Spotify.
Volker maybe you can encourage your friends at Sonos to add support for Amazon Cloud content asap!
You can trust that they will like to do that. Without me asking.
