The Great Race To The Cloud
posted in: Features • Music News
Nothing is more frustrating than downloading a song on your phone and having it stranded there, except for maybe losing your hard drive and saying goodbye to your long-coveted music library. Apple, Google and Amazon have been working on solutions to these problems and more in the form of cloud-based music services. Google and Apple have been hung up on some minor details, called music licenses, but Amazon decided to bypass all of that nonsense and released their service last Tuesday.
Amazon’s Cloud Player and Cloud Drive have already caught a lot of flak from the music industry, and it’s bound to get worse with time. When Billboard asked Amazon’s director of music, Craig Pape, about skipping the licensing step, his answer was concise: “We don’t believe we need licenses to store the customers’ files. We look at it the same way as if someone bought an external hard drive and copy files on there for backup.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. The main issues stem from the fact that users can upload their music to the company’s servers. Record companies are concerned about users uploading illegally downloaded content, which is a reasonable concern, and a Sony spokesperson said “we’re keeping all of our legal options open.” One senior music executive even went as far as calling the service “legalized murder.” Amazon’s Terms of Use prohibit the uploading of illegal music, but if the debate ends up in court it will be interesting to see if Amazon protects its users or turns them over to the labels.
The industry implications of Amazon’s Cloud Player are huge. If they manage to evade a lawsuit, or if the courts decide that what they’re doing is legal, it can set a precedent for all future cloud-based services. Music piracy has been on the decline since LimeWire closed up shop in October, but Cloud Player has the potential to turn that around pretty quickly. On top of that, it would give Amazon a big leg up on Google and Apple who have yet to finalize their services. If you ask us, though, a lawsuit against Amazon is all but inevitable.
