Amazon Cloud Player Service: Music Industry not Thrilled
It was almost to good to be true (if you’re in the US anyway). Seems that the record labels are none too happy with Amazon’s timing of the release of its newest venture: Amazon Cloud Player Service.
According to Reuters, Amazon does not seem to have any of the required licenses that the record labels want them to have. The license is in relation to the fact that the music is stored in the Cloud and can by accessed by a number of devices.
Record Labels Cling to old Business Models
It’s no secret that the music industry wants to hold onto the old ways of how it was done, where they were ultimately in charge of access both to content and the artists. So far they have only allowed new types of music ventures to happen through small startups such as Spotify, Pandora and mSpot. With Amazon entering the game this will mark the first time a major company with real market penetration has tried to play, and more importantly, a company big enough to not allow itself be bullied by the record labels to agree completely to their terms.
The service itself will be interesting to watch. How will it fare against all you can eat deals like Spotify and Napster? How many will buy storage beyond the free 5 GB given?
Amazon Dealing with Record Biz, Beats Google and Apple to Brass Ring
The biggest point though is the fact that Amazon beat Google and Apple to the punch. It will be interesting to see how those two companies respond to this, especially Google who has been working on this type of service since they announced it almost a year ago at Google I/O. Although I think it is safe to say that such a service will be coming to Android sooner rather than later.
In Amazon’s defence they had to get there before Google, as Google can offer a more unified experience because it will be built into the Android OS. The more people Amazon can get using the service now, the better chance they stand of competing.
What does everyone think? Anyone tried it? Hit the comments below to tell us.