Singin’ In The Amazon Cloud

If the sun doesn’t come back out in Austin soon, I’m going to have to move closer to the equator.

But for some, cloudy skies are just what the doctor ordered.

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web, and Cloud Player for Android was announced overnight and tees up some big guns pointed directly at Google and Apple in the online music marketplace.

According to the Amazon press release, “these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are.

“Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud drive for free.”

Music in the clouds?  Or in too many Amazon executive’s heads?

Only time, and perhaps a few gazillion Amazonian music streams, will tell the tale.

The good news is, the streaming service from the Amazon cloud is free.

The bad news is, how do I get all those countless hours of my life back that I spent burning CDs into iTunes?

What do you mean, there’s no rebate for that??

Don’t pay any attention to me, I’m obviously biased (although I’ve never been a big fan of iTunes, either.  Come to think of it, I really just don’t like DRM!)

Engadget deconstructs the new service and explains that it works something like this: Existing Amazon customers in the US can upload their MP3 purchases from Amazon to their own 5GB cloud space (I’ve always wanted to have my own place in the clouds!).

This is then upgradable to a one-year 20GB plan for free upon purchasing an MP3 album, with additional plans then starting at $20 a year.

My two cents: It’s one heckuva lot easier to just subscribe to Slacker or Pandora for a year.

But maybe that’s just me: I gave up moving all those digital files around about the moment I figured out how I was spending way much more time moving music files around that I was actually listening to music.

But, I’m a forever Amazon customer, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and see how this plays out.

Pun intended.