Nobody can argue with the fact that Amazon remains one of the most innovative companies in existence. That was shown, yet again, with their surprise launch of Amazon Cloud Player. This all comes off the heels of their recent inclusion of streaming movies to their Prime members, and the talk of an Amazon App Store for Android.
Cloud Player is a cloud-based music streaming service. They give you 5GB of space for free to upload your existing music collection, then you can stream it to any computer or Android device. If you buy one MP3 album from Amazon, they’ll automatically upgrade you to 20GB of storage.
Worthy of note, too, is the device this service does NOT work on – anything with an “i” on it. That’s right – this doesn’t work (currently) on an iPhone, iPod or iPad. You can do a “work around” by downloading the file from Amazon using mobile Safari, then play it locally. But, as of now, you cannot stream from Amazon to your iOS device. This could be Amazon simply being competitive, or it could be because Apple would have had a hissy fit. Who knows.
Interestingly, if you look at their details for Cloud Drive, it looks like you can store anything you want on there. Potential Dropbox alternative? Hmmm…..
All I know is that Amazon just made Apple look bad… because a cloud-based service is something they should have done a long time ago (rather than require tethering to iTunes). And, that whole Google Music thing?….. they better hurry up. 
Source: Amazon Press Release
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Oh man, don’t give them any ideas. IMHO, this is just the first step for Amazon to make “buying” music a thing of the past. Instead, you’ll rent it.
It is inevitable. People don’t buy CDs nearly as much as they used to. It is all digital MP3 for the most part. Changes the way we manage it, too.
Certainly, the mechanism has changed. But I still think, for the most part, people still like to feel like the “own” the music they’ve purchased, in perpetuity. It’s clear why the industry wants to move that way. But will the ability to play anywhere trump ownership? We’ll probably find out.