Licensed to kill: Amazon revamps Cloud Player to take on iTunes One year after it introduced online music locker Cloud Drive, Amazon has revamped its built-in streaming service Cloud Player with a raft of features to take on Apple's incredibly successful iTunes. This includes iTunes Match-like "Scan and Match" storage, cross-device support and an upgrade to the audio quality, but – perhaps …
There is an underlying assumption that people will buy things without them being advertised. They will to an extent, but why is it that McDonalds, Coke, Wrigglies et al advertise? Do we not know about them? Do the adverts tell us what we didn't know before?
No. People will buy things they think about and without massive promotion and constant, overall sales will fall. That is what the middle-men do. What do you think all the "idol" shows are for? It's to keep you focused on and invested in the musicians so you'll buy their stuff. If you've spent several pounds voting for someone (kerching) and invested an hour or so each week following them, you're reasonably likely to buy their CD. Kerching again.
Personally, I wouldn't be that sad to see more of the media industry die off completely, not just the middlemen. Do we really need Justin (Bieber or Timberlake)? But I'm old and grumpy and think people should spend money on food, retirement, or starving millions in Africa, or perhaps buy your own instrument and play it with your friends. You won't match the studios' production values, but it will probably be more fun than blocking out the world with a pair of headphones.
...so as opposed to few days ago, when I uploaded my new CD through Cloud Player and it ended up in Cloud Drive with unlimited MP3 space (it's not counted against my storage), now it would end up in either, depending on my upload choice but not both (unless you upload it twice.)
This would also mean instead of the usual $20 per year (Cloud Drive 20GB upgrade) it will add another $25/year (Cloud Player) and instead of being literally unlimited for music now it comes with a 250k songs "limit" (yeah, not much of a limit right now but if I get to live another 40 years it'll get tight. :))
Since I won't double-pay and even less double-upload I will just remove all my backups and cancel my Cloud Drive and keep Cloud Player as a music backup for $25 per year and that's it.
Stupid, stupid Amazon. It's not so much about the price but by severing the link between the two services and forcing me to either choose or double upload and double pay they just forced me to drop Cloud Drive entirely so they lost all my future upgrades - I was counting on as my main cloud-based backup space, paying more and more due to continuous upgrades...
Oh wait, its just been matched from my portable device, which is probably a phone, which I keep with me at all times, so I don't actually need cloud access... hmmm.
Where's the benefit again? Ah yes, "washing" unlicensed content. Like itunes, the deal appears to be: you can pirate as much as you want for $25/year, because something is better than nothing for the music industry.
Desperate music industry, desperate cloud looking for a purpose. That said, we do need non-Fruity suppliers in general. I just wish they would pick something a little more useful to do, such as some really good sync software for PC-mobile device. Still, the basis of any good management system is to have good inventory data, so maybe its a start and we'll end up with accurate metadata to work with.
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