Posted on Wednesday, March 30 2011 @ 22:08 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bit Tech reports
Amazon has launched two new services that enable you to play your music from the cloud:
The two services work in tandem, with Cloud Drive storing your uploaded music, and the Cloud Player web application enabling you to stream your music to mobile devices or other PCs. It's like Spotify, but with only your music available for streaming.
Registered Amazon customers automatically get 5GB of Cloud Drive storage, upgraded to 20GB for a year so long as you purchase just one MP3 album from Amazon and download it to your Cloud Drive. The Amazon Cloud Player currently supports only MP3 and AAC formats, though, so those looking to stream their FLAC collections are out of luck.
Music labels on the other hand
aren't pleased by this announcement:
According to a number of reports since the launch, the music industry is not happy about this development, but seems unsure what, if anything, it can do about it. Reuters heard from Sony, which made it clear that it wanted Amazon to reach a new license deal that covers the streaming of music, but that it was keeping its legal options open.
All Things D explores whether a license to sell MP3 files precludes the provision of an ancillary cloud service. It also asked Amazon what licensing agreements it has with rights-holders covering this new service, and got this response: "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."
