As you probably read, this week Amazon announced a new option for music aficionados. Their Cloud Drive service allows people to store files (including music) on Amazon’s servers, and their Cloud Player allows people to stream their music files to either Android devices (phones or tablets) or their favorite browser.
It’s an interesting idea to be sure, and certainly has advantages and disadvantages over the conventional approach to keeping your music locally on your MP3 player or smart phone. But do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Here’s my take.
First let’s start with the advantages (from my perspective).
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1) You no longer have to worry about keeping your music collection synchronized across several devices. I currently have an iPhone, an MP3 player for my car, three iPods and three PC’s that I occasionally use for listening to music. I certainly try to keep the music on all these sync’d, but in practice it’s a royal pain. For instance, if I buy a CD (which I do about once a year these days) I have to rip it on one of my PC’s, then transfer it to all my other devices (I haven’t “played” a CD in years—the first time it comes out of the jewel case it gets ripped, then it goes back into the case and into a storage bin). Basically the same thing is true if I buy an album off of iTunes or Amazon, for instance. It initially gets saved to the PC I synch my iPhone and iPods to, then has to get transferred to all the other devices and PC’s.
1) You no longer have to worry about keeping your music collection synchronized across several devices. I currently have an iPhone, an MP3 player for my car, three iPods and three PC’s that I occasionally use for listening to music. I certainly try to keep the music on all these sync’d, but in practice it’s a royal pain. For instance, if I buy a CD (which I do about once a year these days) I have to rip it on one of my PC’s, then transfer it to all my other devices (I haven’t “played” a CD in years—the first time it comes out of the jewel case it gets ripped, then it goes back into the case and into a storage bin). Basically the same thing is true if I buy an album off of iTunes or Amazon, for instance. It initially gets saved to the PC I synch my iPhone and iPods to, then has to get transferred to all the other devices and PC’s.
2) You no longer have to worry about storage space on your music player. If your music collection is bigger than the storage space on your player (or your phone) you have to constantly decide what music you want to take with you vs. what music you want to leave behind. With Amazon’s new Cloud Player, it doesn’t matter how much local storage your device has: as long as it can connect to the internet, it can play any of the music you have stored in the cloud. And you can store as much as you want (for a price, of course). So another advantage is that you might be able to save some money the next time you buy a phone by buying a cheaper model with less memory, but still be able to access and listen to all of your music.
To be fair, there are some rather severe disadvantages (in my humble opinion) as well.
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1) To be able to listen to your music, your music player (or PC) must be connected to the internet. Not so much a problem if you are listening to your music on your phone (unless you are on an airplane; or in an area where you have no service; or you are bandwidth-capped by your phone company; or if streaming your music kicks you into a higher bandwidth billing rate for the month, etc.). But none of the iPods or other MP3 players I own connect to the internet, so a bit of a disadvantage there. Not a big deal: future devices will if this takes off. Perhaps a bigger concern is the following.
1) To be able to listen to your music, your music player (or PC) must be connected to the internet. Not so much a problem if you are listening to your music on your phone (unless you are on an airplane; or in an area where you have no service; or you are bandwidth-capped by your phone company; or if streaming your music kicks you into a higher bandwidth billing rate for the month, etc.). But none of the iPods or other MP3 players I own connect to the internet, so a bit of a disadvantage there. Not a big deal: future devices will if this takes off. Perhaps a bigger concern is the following.
2) You have to trust that the cloud won’t eat your data. There are numerous examples out there of organizations starting a cloud-based storage solution for various data, only to shut down and delete all the data months or years later. Granted, “the cloud” is a lot less risky as a storage locker than it used to be, but ultimately your data is beyond your physical control. I can see keeping a copy of my music in the cloud for convenience sake, but not my *only* copy.
The biggest problem is that, at least the way it works today, it might be illegal. Not illegal for you to store your music on Amazon’s servers and not illegal for Amazon to store your music for you, but illegal for Amazon to *stream* your music to your device. If you’ve been around for a while you might recall a similar offering by a company called MP3.com over a decade ago: it was promptly sued into oblivion by the music industry. Now granted, Amazon offering a similar service is a much different proposition. And I would think they will be able to sufficiently license rights to stream music from the music industry (What? You don’t want to license us the rights? Ok, no problem. We’ll just stop selling your CD’s). And it appears that other big players also want to enter this “cloud music storage” model (such as Apple and/or Google), so the music industry will likely get the deal done whether they like the idea or not.
So as a convenience, the advantages might outweigh the disadvantages for some people. But personally I think I’ll hold off for a while. At least until everyone figures out how I can use the service on an airplane.
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