Amazon Cloud music locker beats all to the punch
By James • Mar 30th, 2011 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: ottonassar / Flickr
The race has been on for some time to be the first major company to launch an online service for storing all of your own music and media, and streaming it from there. Many have called this a music locker, or, more generally, a media locker. Yesterday, Amazon unveiled it’s beaten everybody to the punch, by introducing the Amazon Cloud Drive and the Amazon Cloud Player.
Smart strategy, too
In the press release unveiling their online locker, Amazon touts the service as providing free storage for the first 5GB, which then expands to 20GB free storage once you’ve purchased an mp3 album from Amazon. Additionally, all albums you purchase from the online retailer will be added to the Amazon Cloud Drive automatically, and will not count against your quota.
Storage convenience
Effectively what this does is it eliminates the need to carry music around with you on your devices – taking up valuable storage space – or storing it on alternative storage solutions.
In a press release, Bill Carr, who is the Vice President of Movies and Music at the retailer, says: ‘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. 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.’
The smartphone invasion
In addition to the Amazon Cloud Drive, the company has introduced the Amazon Cloud Player, which lets you play music directly from a browser on your Mac and Windows PCs, as well as on Android smartphones and tablets through the Amazon MP3 app. It’s inevitable that this will make its way to iOS, and even Windows Phone 7 in due time.
The music locker is effectively Dropbox for all your audio files. And therein is the genius of it – Amazon will allow you to both stream and download files stored on the server, making it a very compelling proposition.
Your move, Apple.
Tags for this article: amazon, music streaming
