First Look: Amazon Cloud Player and Drive
We are so happy to introduce the newest contributor to the Tag Team Tech blog. Geoff Woolf is a cross platform tech ninja who lives for discovering new apps. Believe us, he's where we most likely find out about the latest mobile apps.
Amazon Cloud
by Geoff Woolf
In case you weren’t sure that Amazon was dedicated to eating Google’s lunch, the release of Amazon’s “Cloud Player” and “Cloud Drive” less than a week after the launch of their (arguably superior) Appstore should remove all doubt. In a week when Google announced that the “dog-fooding” of the fabled Google Music, Amazon, as the culmination of a brilliantly kept secret, stole what little momentum Google might have been building by dropping a fully formed cloud music service on Monday at midnight. Amazon’s Cloud player is a music “locker” system that allows users to purchase MP3s from the retailer and keep them “in the cloud” for streaming to a desktop or android device using Amazon’s Cloud Player. As always, the tracks remain available for download at any time by the purchaser. The killer feature of Cloud Drive, however, is that users may upload non DRM tracks from their existing music collections for streaming along with their Amazon purchases. All users are given free space of 5GB (Amazon purchases do not count toward this limit), but with the purchase of one album, they will be automatically upgraded to a free 20GB account for one year. More space than that will cost one dollar per gig, per year (so a 50GB account would run $50) for as much as 1TB of storage at $1000 per year. The Cloud Player uploader is an Adobe Air-based app that allows uploading of individual files or folders of up to 2GB apiece. The Cloud Drive supports storage of virtually any type of file as well, so it offers an alternative to other cloud storage apps like Dropbox and Live Mesh. Pros: Generous first year storage deal, excellent catalog available for download, good sound quality and streaming Cons and Editorial: The future is uncertain. Amazon appears to have launched Cloud Player without the blessing of the major record labels, which will almost certainly lead to messy and expensive legal wranglings. It is likely this lack of “blessing” that has kept others like Google and Apple from offering similar services. Amazon’s locker system clearly flies in the face of Labels’ and Publishers’ desire to force consumers to buy multiple copies of songs and albums--on each device. And Amazon’s consumer-friendly approach is bound to cause trouble with an industry that has spent the last 10 years systematically alienating its public through dogged unwillingness and inability to adjust to new listening and buying paradigms.
