Amazon seems to have caught a lot of people off guard this week when they announced the availability of their new Amazon Cloud Player and File Storage. The premise is pretty straight forward. They give you 5GB of cloud storage to actually store any files that you want but feature the ability to play MP3’s directly over the Internet using a web based interface to your music.
Amazon certainly has the cloud storage thing figured out based on their popular S3 storage service so what they have really done is provide an interface layer to this storage for our personal use. By providing everyone 5GB of free storage they give us all a chance to have another spot to store files for easy access anywhere we have a web browser and Internet access.
I think the MP3 player aspect is a bonus offer – this is really about cloud storage. Why do I say that? Well they will give you access to any Amazon MP3 Store purchases you have made so they can be played via the web based music app and the MP3’s do not count against your 5GB of storage. You can also download your Amazon MP3 purchases to any device or computer as many times as you want via the cloud file storage interface – again – giving the consumer easy access to your MP3 purchases.
Of course the business model is to sell you additional cloud storage for all of the other files you want to store in this online file cabinet. That storage runs $1 per GB, per year starting at 20GB. They do have a special offer with this launch and that provides you with 20GB of free storage for a year if you purchase an Amazon MP3 album.
All in all I think this is a great deal and I like the idea of having access to my music anywhere however, I do have a point of contention. Why can’t my previous Amazon MP3 purchases be made available via the new cloud player? I mean it is great that any new purchases will be available there but I would like to see that extensive collection of music I have already purchased from Amazon be available as well.
What do you say Amazon? How about giving us access to our previous MP3 purchases?