Amazon Announces Cloud Player/Cloud Drive

Amazon announced a new product/service offering recently in an apparent bid to advance the digital music purchase and consumption paradigm.

Cloud Player and Cloud Drive will allow users both to purchase music which they can then stream remotely from any web-enabled device and also to upload files from their current digital libraries (including photos and videos) for additional streaming capability. This model is not unlike the Lala Music Mover cloud-syncing service released a few years ago which failed to gain any significant degree of traction.

An aspect of note with regard to the current offering is the apparent lack of need for large blanket licenses from major record labels which has proven to be the bane of a number of aspiring music streaming services including the US version of Spotify. Amazon claims that Cloud Drive functions along the same lines as Google Docs and other user-directed cloud storage services and thus does not require any licenses from labels.

Amazon does contend that the ability for labels to participate in the process would exist for some model in which a single label-licensed file of a commonly uploaded song could be substituted for a user’s copy sparing the user the hassle of uploading it themselves.

It is unclear at this point exactly to what extent this model will prove to have an impact on the industry at large but this does appear to continue along recent trends for such services although Amazon’s ubiquitous nature may prove to be the piece of the puzzle which has been missing up to this point in terms of success.

For more on the Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, visit HERE.

-Patrick Reagin (RabbitHole Consulting/Center for Music and Arts Entrepreneurship)