Awesome.
These two things are awesome,
Songs purchased from Amazon MP3 are stored in your Cloud Drive for free
When you purchase songs or albums from the Amazon MP3 Store, you can now save your purchases to your Cloud Drive. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. Even better, you can listen to your music from any web-connected computer with Amazon Cloud Player.
And the best part? When you save your Amazon MP3 Store purchases directly to your Cloud Drive, they don’t take up any of your storage space and are always stored for free.
Buy an MP3 album—get 20 GB of storage free for a year
Purchase an album from the Amazon MP3 Store and we’ll give you 20 GB of storage free of charge for one year from the date of your purchase. That’s enough space to store up to 4000 songs. You can keep your 20 GB storage plan after the year is up or do nothing and we’ll drop you down to our free 5 GB plan. Don’t worry—you will never be charged for storage space unless you choose to upgrade to a paid storage plan. Learn more about the 20 GB promotion
Also they have some decent Albums on sale for under 3.99. I bought Birth Of The Cool (Rudy Van Gelder Edition) by Miles Davis for 2.99 and saved it to my cloud and that counted towards the 20gig offer. I just need to figure out how to get all of the music that I have bought from amazon before onto this thing.
So will this get an iPhone app, or will Apple block it?
The only reason I could see them blocking it is if they plan to do a similar rollout (and lots of rumors that iOS 5 will be this, basically).
I have about 80 gigs of MP3s so just tossing them all in a cloud drive isn’t really an option!
Can I have an offline cache of my music on my local hard drive? That way it’s just a cheap and convenient backup.
Well, it is an option, just not a free one. 100 gb for $100/year.
Since Amazon’s MP3 store is the one I use mostly, I’m certainly liking the sound of this announcement.
Yeah. Having the option to redownload them alone is a nice change of pace.
Once they have cloud storage of their music, and a player that streams directly from that cloud, it seems like they’re pretty close to a subscription service. If they could do THAT, giving a subscription to all (or even a large subset) of the music they have available, that’d be slick.
I want to have Amazon’s babies. AND I DON’T EVEN HAVE A UTERUS!
I’m trying to figure out how I can replace my Dropbox subscription with this.
It says a lot about a man that is willing to buy a glee song over the other stuff…no matter what the price.
Only 70 hours until all my music is uploaded.
How does the software compare to dropbox? Dropbox to me is slightly feature poor, but makes up for that in reliability and easy of use. Windows live drive has some nice features but otherwise sucks.
I’m wondering what kind of apps will become available for this. It’s certainly a blow to Dropbox, but I still like their folder on each of the machines that I use to sync up files that I use often all in one place.
As an iPhone user, I await to see how Apple handles this and if they’ll allow Amazon or 3rd party apps to take advantage of this space. Crossing my fingers here.
Considering it is widely speculated that the focus of iOS 5 will be doing exactly what Amazon is doing here, I wouldn’t hold my breath on this. I’m fairly sure Apple will do everything in their power to block this. In fact, I’m pretty much certain the entire reason they went with that 30% content fee thing that pissed everyone off was a preemptive move on this space and has nothing to do with newspapers and such (those were just caught in the crossfire).
The industry in general has known for a long time now that Amazon, Google and Apple are all working on solutions for this issue, the only question was who will ship first. The fact that Amazon was willing to ship out with an Android app and no iPhone/iPad app is pretty telling as to what the future holds for this specific service on iOS.
There’s also the rumor that Amazon is going to ship a Android tablet, this would kind of back that up.
If Amazon publishes an API for Cloud Drive then someone could come up with iOS apps pretty darned quickly. Given that I would guess this is just a very slick frontend to their EC2 storage, it shouldn’t be THAT difficult.
I’m pretty sure any such app will be rejected by Apple whether it is from Amazon or not unless it allows you to buy mp3s for the same price as Amazon.com while giving 30% of that to Apple.
Of course, on a jailbroken iPhone then that is irrelevant and this is exactly the sort of thing where I could imagine a third party making a Cydia-market app for, if Amazon does make the APIs open.
Forget Microsoft, Motorola, and RIMM - Apple should be worried about Amazon.com. Like Lum said, there are very solid rumors that they are going to build their own tablet, and it just makes sense. They are the only other company besides Apple with an extremely strong content pipeline that can fill such a device.