Amazon Cloud Player Now Does Song Matches

Talk about a long time coming. Amazon recently updated their Cloud Player music service so it now has a function similar to iTunes Match where it scans your computer to match the songs in a master database. This allows you to listen to your songs on multiple devices without having the laborious task of uploading them to every one.

The only trouble was that iTunes had this over a year ago.

Here's the problem. A feature like this requires a new license from the record labels, which Apple was way ahead of the curve to get. Amazon had a long tough negotiation after the fact, since the labels felt that they could get a better deal than they got from Apple. So now that just leaves Google's music service on the outside looking in, but chances aren't good that will happen, since the majors don't feel that Google does enough to prevent piracy to begin with.

The new Amazon Cloud Player is available in two tiers; 250 songs stored for free, or up to 250,000 for $24.99 a year. The trick is that anything bought from the Amazon store isn't counted in those numbers, and even if you purchased a song at a lower fidelity, all songs are now available at 256kb per second. And the catch? - it won't upload anything with copy protection, which includes just about everything from the iTunes store prior to 2009.

Catch 2 - If you have more than 250 songs already uploaded and he opt for the free version, it will delete any songs above the limite, although you can reimport them when you upgrade. Catch 3 - Amazon has now separated Cloud Music from their Cloud Drive service, so they're now separate subscriptions. That means that you can't store your files along with your music on a single cloud area.

Oh, and there's a catch if you're an artist waiting for a payday thanks to the new license fees extracted from Amazon. Forget about it, since you'll see pennies on the dollar. Most of licensing money goes directly to the labels bottom line and not the artist's.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

5 Things You Should Know About Cloud Music Services

Now that both Amazon and Google have launched their cloud music services, we're just waiting for Apple to complete the triumvirate with their imminent launch. In case you're not clear, a cloud music service (sometimes called a "music locker") stores your music on an online server then delivers it to any of your music playback devices. Before you choose a service though, here are a few facts you should know.

1. Why is a cloud music service so cool? Because you won't fill up half your hard drive with only music if it's stored online for one thing. You'll be able to access your music from any device that connects to the Internet, so you're not restricted to only the device that has your music loaded on it.

2. You have to manually upload your music on both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive. Because both Google and Amazon didn't get permission from the record labels, for right now at least you have to manually upload your entire library if you want access to it. That could take hours and hours depending upon how large the library and the speed of your Internet connection.

3. But you won't need to upload everything on Apple's service. That's the whole key about doing a deal with the record labels; if the service sees that you've already paid for a song or sees the song on your hard drive, it automatically loads a copy into your storage locker without you having to upload it. That means that you're uploading time can theoretically be a few minutes instead of hours and hours.

4. Apple also has a strategic advantage by doing the deals with the labels. If and when Amazon and/or Google decide that they really should have these deals in place, it's going to cost them a lot more to get the deal done. Apple has already set the deal precedent with their label agreements so they won't be getting better for the other two as a result. Any additional costs will get passed on the to consumer, so the Apple service may end up being cheaper than the other two in the long run.

5. Apple's service has another cool feature. Reportedly it pre-caches of a portion of the each song in your library on your player so that as soon as you choose a song, it instantly plays without having to wait to communicate with the cloud first unlike the other services.

The Apple announcement regarding the release of their cloud service is supposed to be any day now, and until that time, we won't have a real head-to-head comparison of services to look at. That said, cloud music is here to stay and it's just a matter of time before it becomes widely adopted.
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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Google's Music Service Launch

On Tuesday Google did a beta launch of their new music service, called "Music Beta By Google." The service includes a free cloud music locker, a music player and integration with an updated Android music app.

The interesting thing is that Google, like Amazon (who recently launched their Amazon Cloud Player), went ahead with their soft launch without the permission of the major record labels. One of the reasons why Google might feel comfortable in doing so is that Music Beta doesn't include any sort of download store or streaming service that generates money, unlike what you'll likely to see from Apple soon. I'd say that the whole idea of the the record labels looking to be paid a second time for a purchase lockered in a cloud service like Music Beta can probably be put to rest now. Obviously both Google and Amazon feel legally comfortable with their position or they wouldn't have gone ahead with their services as they have.

Personally I don't see what the big deal is in terms of getting label permission to store songs. The only thing beyond cloud storage that a locker service offers at this point is a custom music player, although the labels feel that the ability to stream music that you've purchased on any device that you own to be somehow worth an additional payment. Good luck on that guys. It looks like that game is over.

One thing that's worth thinking about though - you still have to upload all of your music to whatever locker service you go with (meaning Google or Amazon, presumably not so with Apple's when it's launched), which can be a huge pain. Music Beta reportedly attempts to ease the pain by automatically determining what songs you listen to most and uploading them to the service first. The thing that label permission does is alleviate the need to upload, since the service will just look to see what songs you have on your drive, and allocate them for use in the cloud.

To sign up for a Music Beta invite, click here, then click on "Request an Invitation" in the upper right corner. Here's a video that explains the service.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for daily discussion of music, recording, and production tips and tricks.

Amazon Is First To The Digital Music Locker - So What?

Today Amazon announced a digital music locker service that enables users to upload and stream their music on multiple devices (PCs, Macs, and Android phones and tablets, and anything on the Android operating system, which eliminates iPhones nor iPads for now). The service is called the "Amazon Cloud Player" and all US Amazon customers start with 5GB free, which they then can then upgrade for $20 a year to 20GB. The twist is that just by buying an MP3 album at Amazon, you will automatically get the extra 20GB for free (which sounds like a great deal).

And the rest of the world breathes a hearty sigh and says, "So What?" This might've been a bigger deal had the announcement come from Apple or even Google, but Amazon, while a leader in books, is a distant second to iTunes in the digital music space with only 15% of the market compared to 70% by iTunes.

The price may be right but you'd be hard-pressed to find a music consumer who couldn't wait for this product. In fact, I'd venture to say that most don't or can't see the advantages to a cloud service for their music. Plus, Amazon pushed full speed ahead with the launch without getting the consent from the labels first, which may be problematic as time goes on.

The idea here is that instead of storing all you music on one desktop, laptop, phone or tablet, you probably want the music on all of those devices. The big pain is having to copy and transfer everything over, and in many cases you just won't have the storage space to do so anyway. A cloud music locker like Amazon's means that you store all of your music on their online servers ("The Cloud") which you can then access from any of your devices, saving you the time of transfer and the storage space.

The downside is that the major labels want to get paid a second time for this privilege, saying that the music that you already bought once doesn't give you the right to stream to any device that you want. Now you can debate that a number of ways, but both Apple and Google (who are rumored to have their own digital music lockers set to debut sometime later in the year) are in discussions with the labels to come to some sort of agreement on this issue. Only time will tell how that will play out.

I guess there's some advantage to being a "first mover" rather than following the crowd when the other companies launch their services, but the fact they haven't done their homework with the labels can end up costing them their advantage. Let's see what the next week, and the label's response, brings.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your comments on your Amazon Cloud Player experiences.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.