Music In The Cloud: What's In Store For Consumers?

Amazon's new Cloud Drive enables consumers to store music remotely in the cloud and access it wherever they go.

Here, a look at some of the concerns consumer advocates and analysts have about Amazon's service and the implications for rival services that Apple and Google may have in the works. There's no charge for Amazon's music customers to store up to 5 gigabytes of music in the cloud. Amazon MP3 purchases also won't count against this quota and customers who purchase one MP3 album will receive an additional 20 gigabytes of storage. But for storage beyond this, NPR's analysis found it will cost about $1 per gigabyte. Consumer Reports notes that it still isn't clear whether Amazon will encounter opposition from music labels, which have "traditionally fought new business models that utilize music from their artists without compensation." The downside to using any one company's service is that if you later change your mind later about the devices you want to own, it may be harder than you think to switch gears and you may have to upload your content again.

paidContent.org notes that Amazon has launched its new online music locker and streamer without any licenses from the labels whose material it will store and distribute, the labels’ umbrella group IFPI tells paidContent. Not a problem, replies Amazon -- licenses aren't necessary for its new Cloud Drive. That could open the retailer to legal complaints from those labels, one of which, EMI, has previously sued a similar-sounding service, MP3.com founder Michael Robertson’s web-based music lockers MP3Tunes and Sideload.com. But Amazon resists any suggestion that it needs licenses for storage. The company says: “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.”