A screen shot of Amazon Cloud Drive interface
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) –- Amazon announced earlier this week it has launched its new Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive) service, which allows users to stream their music collection on any computer or mobile device via the Internet.
The move confirms what many industry analysts have been predicting about the next-generation of music services, moving music into the cloud.
It certainly makes it easier for consumers to acces music among multiple computers and devices, eliminating the timely and often complicated process of uploading music to a computer and manually transferring them between devices.
Amazon’s new service comes at an opportune time, as sales from online song have stagnated.
“Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” Bill Carr, Amazon VP of movies and music, said in a statement. “Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.”
Digital music has become a largely competitive market for Google, Apple, and Amazon, providing the perfect gateway to promote their other cloud products and services.
The launch of Amazon Cloud Drive gives the company the potential to expand on its share of the digital music market.
The company currently only has about a 13 percent share of the digital music market, which is dominated by Apple’s iTunes.
However, one huge drawback of Amazon Cloud Drive is that it was designed without the permission of the major music labels, a move that has angered both Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
Major labels are demanding new licensing terms for cloud services and a larger percentage of online music sales.
Amazon’s enormous server capacity allows the company to offer Cloud Drive users 5GB of music storage for free, or the promotional offer of 20GB if they purchase one album from the company’s storefront.
Though the company is the first to offer such a service, there are other subscription-based services like Last.fm, Rdio, Mog, and Spotify (in Europe) that give users unlimited acccess to stream web-based music on the web and mobile devices.
Amazon has not specified whether it plans to eventually offer a similar unlimited cloud music offering, but Carr did not completely rule out the possibility.
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