Music clouds brew up a storm
News: 13th April 2011 by Louise Dodgson under Record Labels, Selling & Distributing Your Music
Earlier this week Amazon sent an email to record labels to try and extinguish some of the controversy surrounding the launch of their new music cloud service. The gist of the email was to tackle the subject of whether licensing was necessary from copyright holders (Amazon thinks not, it would seem the record labels do, for the most part!) And Amazon's reasoning is quite succinctly summed up here in a snippet from the email:
"Cloud Player is a media management and play-back application not unlike Windows Media Player and any number of other media management applications that let customers manage and play their music. It requires a license from content owners no more than those applications do. It really is that simple."
Amazon also claim that the launch of the service has boosted MP3 sales, although this doesn't seem to be enough to quash anger from the recording industry who are in disbelief that Amazon did not even attempt to contact rightsholders before going ahead.
In the meantime, this series of events seems to have raised a few questions for Google who are working on their own music locker. The latest is that they are rethinking whether elements that require licensing would actually be necessary, and may be thinking of following Amazon's lead. Watch this space...
Related Links
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/04/full-text-of-amazons-cloud-music-email-to-labels.html
Tags
digital music, music cloud service, amazon, apple, google, digital rights manaagement, online music
