It did not take long. Amazon announced its new digital music locker service on Monday, and now the music industry is already issuing statements of discontent. The music services should be licensed, according to Sony Music Entertainment and other major major music industry heavyweights.
What Amazon is actually offering are two services: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. Cloud Drive is simply online storage for your music so that you can access it anywhere. Cloud Player allows you to play your music from any device with a web browser. Sounds pretty cool, right? Sony apparently does not think so.
“We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music, and we hope that Amazon will resolve the situation quickly by agreeing to a license with us. We are keeping all our legal options open,” Sony Music Entertainment said in a statement.
Are there any actually legal issues here? That remains to be seen, but Amazon is in negotiation with record labels for licensing anyway. The labels seem upset that Amazon went ahead without their consent, blood oath, and exchange of first-born children. Since Amazon is not distributing music without permission, and all of the music is presumably owned by the users uploading it for their own private use, you have to wonder what the problem is.
Amazon failed to withstand the wrath of publishers who wanted a bigger cut of Kindle sales. It may find that it is not worth the money or time to fight the notoriously lawsuit-ready recording industry over similar complaints.
