Ares Connect

An elephant named Amazon Cloud Drive just entered into the already crowded room that is online music sharing. Of course it makes perfect sense that Amazon.com would seek a piece of this massive pie, since they already have the most sophisticated online content delivery systems in place for their bookstore. Not too mention the huge customer base, state of the art shopping cart systems, AND a huge war chest of funds that will come in handy to battle the thousands of very aggressive lawyers employed by the recording industry.

Strangely enough, the current leader in online music downloads, Apple computer, is thought to be a beneficiary of this latest move. Confused? So were we.
The thinking is that Amazon will break the ground with the first widespread online content locker, and apple will soon follow with a superior service and control of the storage devices that 69% of online music lovers already use.

Amazon told All Things Digital that it doesn’t need licenses for music storage. What is less clear is whether or not it need licenses for streaming. (In fact, the labels themselves do not seem to be clear on that either.) Insiders told Reuters that unlicensed streaming might be illegal; in 2007, a similar storage locker service was sued by EMI for copyright infringement. EMI didn’t win, but the mere threat of the label litigation seems to have kept many from pursuing lockers.

Obviously it makes great business sense for Amazon to go after this market, but the ancillary benefit could be huge. Amazon is one of just a handful of companies with the resources to stand up to the music industry on this one. Like we said, sit back and enjoy.

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