Amazon caused a media ripple yesterday when it connected its previously independent Amazon Cloud Player with its MP3 Store. The Cloud Player is an online music locker where customers can store their owned tracks (whether purchased from Amazon or not), and play them from any device which can run an Amazon Cloud Player app (pretty much any device). People who prefer outright ownership of music, as opposed to the access model which motivates Spotify and Rhapsody, can get the benefits of mobility by maintaining their collections in the cloud, like celestial jukeboxes.
In mashing up the Cloud Player with the MP3 Store, Amazon joins buying, storing, and mobile playing in an agreeably seamless connection. That’s why Hypebot headlined the news: “Amazon Finally Gets Closer to iTunes” — Apple’s download store is likewise integrated with its iCloud service.
But of course Apple owns the whole three-legged stool of downloading, cloud storage, and internet radio streaming, designed to cozy
the user into an embryo of uninterrupted music monetization, at home and on the go. No less for Google, too, by the way, even though nobody’s talking about it during this period of obsessive Apple scrutiny.
Straddling the competitive fence which divides Apple and Google is one of Amazon’s cutting advantages. It has navigated mobile-OS politics by forking Android into a specialized operating system for Kindle Fire tablets, thereby remaining secular amid the tablet holy wars. Amazon apps are distributed to both iOS and Android phones and tablets. Amazon is everywhere, trading rabid fanboyism for the privilege of being despised by nobody.
From what better position to forge the missing link in the triplet chain of music merchandising? Last May, The Verge reported that Amazon was in talks with labels about a music subscription service. This is the ecosystem roadmap: sell the downloads first; provide universal cloud access second; lock in the user with unlimited listening third. If Amazon were to bundle a streaming platform into what is already a packed-with-value Amazon Prime membership, which now provides streaming movies and television, the media-loving consumer sector might undergo some kind of rapture and rise to the heavens.
If not, yesterday’s cloud/download maneuver will have been just another incremental product update. We’ll see.