What You Need To Know About Amazon's New Music Service 
 
 i itoggle caption istockphoto.com istockphoto.com 
 
 Amazon announced early today that it would immediately make available a cloud-based media service called Cloud Drive. Actually, it's less a music service and more like an off-site storage locker with an app that serves as a mobile interface. Amazon is pushing the convenience angle hard, appealing to hypothetical consumers' sense of frustration at having to save and copy between multiple music libraries. The Cloud Drive, it says, will get rid of all that hassle. 
 
 Customers who use the service will essentially lease storage space on Amazon servers from which they will be able to download or stream content: music, videos, photos — from any computer with an Internet connection, or from an Android phone — that they have bought from Amazon, or uploaded to the service. 
 
 We spent the morning playing around with Amazon's Cloud Player to try and figure out how it works and what it means for users. What do you need to know? Here are some of the highlights. 
 
 - Do I have to buy all of my songs over again, or can I just upload songs from my hard drive to the cloud until my locker is full? 
 
 When you log in to the Cloud Player and download the uploader tool, Amazon searches your hard drive — including your iTunes folder — and asks if you want to upload the MP3s it finds to your Cloud Drive. It took about an hour to upload 460 songs from one hard drive in our office to the Cloud Drive. On a wireless connection it took 3 1/2 hours to upload about 300 songs. 
 
 There were 490 audio files on that drive, though. And here's where you run into Amazon's restrictions. The Cloud Drive only accepts MP3 and AAC files, so fans of .wav, .flac and other lossless formats will have to convert those files or leave them out of the cloud. 
 
 Here are the other files Amazon says you won't be able to upload: songs with DRM; songs that are bigger than 100 MBs; ringtones, podcasts, audiobooks and "other non-music audio files."* 
 
 *Amazon says it won't upload podcasts, but we had no problem uploading an hour-long podcast saved as an MP3 and listening to it from the Cloud Player. 
 
 - Which labels are involved? 
 
 All of them and none of them. Right now, if you've got a song on your computer, it doesn't matter who released it. But Amazon doesn't have agreements with any particular label, because it says there's no need to have the permission of copyright holders — since the Cloud Drive is just holding onto your property. The labels might not see it the same way, and this is the problem an older cloud-based music service called MP3tunes ran into. It continues to operate, but under the shadow of a pending lawsuit from from labels and publishers under the umbrella of the major label EMI. 
 
 - How does this change the way labels and musicians get paid? 
 
 It doesn't. Which will generate plenty of controversy, especially if the Cloud Player takes off. Amazon is calling the Cloud Drive just another storage option for users, one that has many ports of entry. That position allows them to argue that uploading and copying MP3s from one drive to another isn't a transaction that needs to involve labels, publishers, musicians or other copyright holders in any way. 
 
 - How much will this cost me? 
 
 The first 5 GB of storage are free. Amazon says it will store each and every MP3 you buy from them for free – so those files don't count toward your first 5 GB. Right now Amazon is offering 20 GB of additional free storage if you buy one MP3 album from it. If you want more, it will cost you about a $1 a GB, so that means $100 a year will get you space for maybe 20,000 songs or 7 hours of HD video. Compare this to buying a hard drive to store your files: 500 GB for a onetime payment of $50. 
 
 itoggle caption via Amazon.com 
 
 - If I'm on the subway and have no network access, can I listen to a song that's on my Cloud Drive? 
 
 
 
 Yes, sort of. The Amazon MP3 app for Android phones (not available via the iTunes App store, which means iPhone users won't have access to their Cloud Drive on the go) has two settings. (1) You can listen to the music saved to your phone's memory at any time. (2) If you have cellular reception or a wifi connection, you can access your locker and either stream those songs or download them to your device. 
 
 - Is this going to make AT&T; and Verizon extremely happy? Are my data rates going to go up if I'm streaming my library from a cloud-based locker? 
 
 There's no reason to think that streaming or downloading songs from your locker wouldn't count toward whatever data limits your cell phone plan includes. And yeah, if lots of users go over their limits, carriers will probably make a bundle, as long as their networks don't crash from the increased traffic. 
 
 - What format will songs be in? Do I have a choice? Are the songs in my locker mine? Or are they just links to saved versions of files on the cloud that everybody shares access to? 
 
 The songs you stream from Amazon's player will be MP3s or AACs, because those are the only formats it allows you to upload. Rather than sharing access to a central library of material, the songs in the locker are yours — when you upload them to Amazon's cloud, you're uploading a copy of each one. 
 
 - So now all of my songs are safe forever, right? They're not gone if my laptop gets run over by a lawn mower or my baby sister eats my hard drive or I drop my Droid in my whiskey? 
 
 Here's where storage space that keeps all of your files and identifies them with you becomes a double-edged sword. Ostensibly, yes. Your files are now away from moving parts and become the responsibility of a corporate entity. They are also away from your direct control. What if the people that own the copyrights to the songs you uploaded to Amazon's cloud make and win the argument that you didn't pay for them, or you didn't pay enough for them, or they just never really belonged to you and convinces Amazon to destroy the files in question from their servers? If that happens your files are just as gone. Unless, of course, you back them up somewhere else. But doesn't that sound like a hassle? ||||| Internet retailer gets the jump on Apple and Google with a service that lets users upload song files to its servers for playback on any PC, Mac, or Android device, wherever they are. 
 
 Amazon's new digital music locker service. (Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET) 
 
 Amazon got the jump on Apple and Google this evening with the launch of a much-anticipated digital music locker service that allows users to store their music on the Web and then listen to their collections on computers with a Web browser or on Android devices. 
 
 Amazon Cloud Drive allows users to upload their digital music files--either AAC or MP3 formats--at their original bit rate to Amazon servers for storage and playback on any Web-connected PC, Mac, or Android device, wherever they are. 
 
 "Our customers have told us they don't want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices," Bill Carr, vice president of movies and music at Amazon.com, said in a statement. "Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere." 
 
 Related Links: 
 
  Google begins testing Google Music internally 
 
  Rumor: New MobileMe to cost $20/year, include music 'Locker' 
 
  Study: Streaming music use to explode in five years 
 
 
 
 The Amazon service's Cloud Player for Web allows customers to listen to their music on any computer running the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari for Mac, or Chrome browsers. The Cloud Player for Android is a new version of the Amazon MP3 app and includes the full Amazon MP3 Store and the mobile version of Cloud Player. Customers can use the app to play music stored on their Cloud Drive and music stored locally on their device. 
 
 The Cloud Drive also allows customers to upload photos, videos, and documents, but those digital files are accessible only via a Web browser on a computer. 
 
 Customers will automatically start with 5GB of free storage, upgradable to 20GB with the purchase of an Amazon MP3 album. Additional storage space can be purchased in plans beginning at $20 per 20GB per year. 
 
 CNET was first to report last week that Amazon was working on creating a digital locker service for users' film and music libraries and might make an announcement as early as this week. Sources told my colleague Greg Sandoval that as of last week the online retailer giant had not obtained all the necessary licenses, but that Amazon might announce the service before all the negotiations were complete. 
 
 This evening's launch gives Amazon a leg up on Apple and Google, which are reportedly working on competing efforts. 
 
 Apple has reportedly been looking to expand its MobileMe service into a music storage and streaming service. However, the Mac and iPhone maker is supposedly looking at a fall release date to coincide with a revamped mobile OS with a greater focus on cloud-based services and other enhancements. 
 
 Meanwhile, Google has begun testing its Google Music streaming service for Web-connected devices with its employees--a sign that the service is nearly ready to launch. A working version of the service was reportedly discovered after an installation of the Honeycomb version of the Android operating system on a phone. It's reportedly close to being ready to launch but is being held up by music licensing negotiations. 
 
 Story updated throughout the evening.
– Amazon has launched a new service that allows people to store their music on the company's servers and play it on their computers or Android devices, reports CNET. The move is getting plenty of buzz because Amazon beat both Apple and Google in the development of a so-called cloud system, notes the Los Angeles Times. A handful of smaller companies offer such digital musical lockers, but Amazon is the first big player. With the Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, customers start with 5GB of free storage (figure about 1,000 songs), but that jumps to 20GB if they buy an Amazon MP3 album. Additional storage can be purchased in various plans. NPR's The Record blog has been playing with the new service and provides some basics for potential users. TechDirt, meanwhile, thinks Amazon could run into legal trouble over whether it needs licenses from record labels to store all this stuff.