In the event you missed the inside track, last night Amazon gave us a bit of surprise by launching its free Cloud Player service, which helps you to stream your music collection from the cloud for your computer or Android device. While this has definitely put a grin on many faces (American ones only, for now), Sony Music isn’t too happy about Amazon jumping the gun over licensing for streaming rights. The record label told Reuters that it’s hoping Amazon “will reach a brand new license deal, but we’re keeping all of our legal options open.” Yikes. In retaliation, Amazon responded with here statement to Ars Tehcnica:
“Cloud Player is an application that lets customers manage and play their very own music. It’s like all choice of existing media management applications. We don’t desire a license to make Cloud Player available. The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is equal to if a customer were to save lots of their music to an external hard disk drive and even iTunes.”
Of course, the larger story this is that Amazon’s free Cloud Player goes head-to-head with Sony’s Music Unlimited streaming subscription service, which was pushed out last month after a number of money talk with various record labels. Understandably, Sony isn’t willing to let Amazon cut during the red tape here with no fight, and this will also affect similar music locker services like mSpot and MP3Tunes , albeit at a far smaller scale. Actually, Sony’s already expressed its discomfort with those particular companies’ mode of operation, so that you can most likely expect to peer this tension boiling over to a few style of legal action before long. Now that a huge shot like Amazon’s involved, it’s almost inevitable.
[Due to everyone who sent this in]
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