A cloud? Like a cloud in the sky? Except it is on the web. Amazon has launched its own music streaming service, the Amazon Cloud Player, and you can now upload your mp3s to a 5 GB cloud space for free.
You can even upgrade it to a year 20GB plan for free if you purchase a mp3 album, with some additional plans at $20 a year.
Your music is securely stored in the cloud, and you can stream it whenever you want. It is apparently very easy to upload any mp3 in your cloud (I did it!), even if it was not purchased on Amazon and as long as you have a browser and access to the web you can listen to it. Cloud Player for Android has even a mobile version of Cloud Player, which allows you to play the music from any mobile device.
Of course, you can search and browse by artist, album, song, you can play, pause, skip, shuffle, repeat and adjust the volume, like for any other player.
Amazon is doing it before Apple/iTunesnd the major labels have denied they've given Amazon permission,Amazon are claiming they don't need permission and they may be write. Still, many are predicting that it is just a question of time, the best guesses are two years away, before everyone else is doing the same thing.
So is it the future? Are the mp3-download times over? Will we be soon all streaming songs from a cloud (or whatever the other companies call it) on the internet without really having the mp3 stored on your computer?
I feel old, sure mp3 files can be space consuming, and there would be no more reason to worry about hard drive crashing, but I like having my little mp3 files, I get the impression I still have control… but this Amazon cloud? I know that the internet is already a big spying place, but isn’t it asking for even less privacy?
Will Amazon be able to know if I purchased these mp3s from Amazon or iTunes, or if I even paid anything for them? Will thieves be caught if they upload ripped off files? It seems so insecure suddenly, but the future may well be in the clouds.