Just wanted to share my early thoughts. Basically, the interface for getting your music uploaded is terrible, and the player on the phone is even more poorly designed. The cloud storage in general is not as useful as the automatic behavior of Dropbox.

However, I now have all of my music available to me at all times (as long as I have 3G/WiFi). Naturally, I can't play any of my Zune subscription music, but I can fit all of that on my Zune HD and put everything else in the cloud to play anywhere. I'm going to help my wife set her service up, which will let her play her full collection at work through the web player, which is actually pretty good. In the end, I'm still going to use my Zune HD for the bulk of my music listening because the player is SO superior to the awful app, but for "deep tracks," so to speak, this is a fantastic option. "You mean you've never heard ____? Well, I happen to have them on my phone with 8GB of storage, along with all the other 40GB of files I own."

The advantage it DOES have over Dropbox is that it's half the price. It's basically $1 per GB per year, which isn't too bad for this kind of service. Plus, for the moment they're running a special where if you buy an album from Amazon's MP3 store, they automatically give you a year of 20GB (instead of the free 5GB, which is also around double what Dropbox offers). Plus, in a smart move to try to push more sales from their own music store, the tracks you buy there don't count against your space.

In the end, Amazon has done an incredible job of beating everyone to the punch on this. Lala was sort of first with it (not exactly the same), but they're not around and Apple seems to be dragging their feet on doing something with it (Google's dragging their feet on their own service as well). I suspect that Apple will eventually come out with something much prettier, and Google might have something a little cheaper and integrated with Android or other Google services (plus it would probably use the extra space I already pay for, which is much cheaper than Amazon). But for now, Amazon is the first out of the gate.

One last thing: apparently Sony is already (one day later) bringing up licensing concerns because they're a bunch of morons. Apparently they don't grasp that I'm putting the exact tracks I own up there and listening to them, and nobody else can hear them. Just because they're stored in a different place doesn't mean the content has been transformed into something else. I could be using Orb to the exact same end result, but Sony doesn't seem to be going after them. Sony gets worse and worse as a company every week, it seems.

To sum up: the software is mostly terrible, but the web player is decent, the service does exactly what you want it to do, and they're the first ones to market. I'll be using this myself.


ps- Android users, you don't need to have Amazon's app store installed to download the app. It's probably already installed on your phone, and you just need to check for an update if you haven't been prompted already.

It isn't a matter of what they grasp, but what the people they are trying to convince can grasp. Any change in the mode of listening seems to be an opportunity for attempting to extract money it seems.

I may have become semi-cynical.

Thanks for the post- this is exciting stuff.

The only reason Sony doesn't go after Orb is because there's simply not enough meat on them bones to make it worth it. You don't see Lions hunting ants either. Amazon on the other hand is pretty meaty and juicy, lots of cash to bleed.

Sony and many other record companies don't see any kind of format transfer as acceptable - that's nothing new. That means you buy your music in one format or medium and it must stay there unless you buy it again. And when you buy MP3s, they'd better stay on your computer or iPod. Sad, but that's the way it is.

Maybe they're trying to say that since the info comes from the cloud that it's amazon re-broadcasting the content. For which they likely don't have the correct licenses, yadda yadda yadda.

It would be nice to see Amazon and Apple get into the music publishing biz just to give these guys a reality check. But, I don't really wish for that because it's the slippery slope thing again where these guys (Amazon and Apple) just get more control to exert over other much smaller guys who don't need to be slapped around.

Didn't mp3.com try something like this and have to pull it? I think with theirs you just had to insert the disk to verify you had it vs uploading the entire file.

The disc based system MP3.com came up with was pretty clever, but it also opened them up to an easy loss in court. Basically they lost due to not actually playing back the users version of the song, and instead playing back a single copy that MP3.com didn't have the rights to rebroadcast.

As for the actual service, I'm going to give it a look probably this weekend. The downside is yet another service using up data to mobile devices at a time when the carriers are really trying to tighten down with transfer caps. I wonder how much longer it will be before the tech companies just band together to build a better internet to allow them to keep moving forward. Google is already on this path with the gigabit experiment.

That's a good point, Tom, and this will probably use up a bit of data, though probably not enough to push against most caps on its own. Video is the real killer there.

I'm all for companies like this going over the heads of the ISPs and the recording industries. I'm sure they could be just as evil, but at least it usually benefits them to help out the consumer a little while they're doing it, whereas it seems the companies currently in charge are actively anti-customer.

I've been playing around with the service a little more, and my opinions haven't changed at all. It's funny, I've heard some tech journalists call Amazon's service an iTunes competitor. I've heard just as many call it a Dropbox competitor. In reality, it's solidly in-between those two services, and in both good and bad ways. It's still extremely clunky and poorly designed for the most part, but it's great for basic and easy access to your files and music. Dropbox, on the other hand is not really great for music stuff and costs too much for my taste. But for what it does, it's sort of magical.

I don't see Apple having much trouble when they come out with their own service. Well, except for people like me who won't use it, but I don't matter to them. They already have millions of iTunes users, and even the people who started buying their music from Amazon when iTunes was DRM have gone back to Apple just because it's easier even if it's not only cheaper. Using Apple's cloud service will be the same way. Some might use Amazon briefly, but switch when the other product is ready. Of course, this is assuming Apple will start such a service. I'm assuming that, but what about you folks?

I pretty much have drunk the apple cool-aid, so I'll be excited when Apple goes this route.

I hardly buy any music from anywhere other than iTunes these days. It's just too convenient.

If you use any devices other than iPod (ie...empeg) Amazon is almost as convenient and does mp3. I use them almost exclusively.