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Here’s Why Amazon Picked A Fight With The Labels

image from www.clker.com Some are writing volumes about how the labels are going to force Amazon to license their new Cloud Player and Cloud storage locker. The real story is that Amazon already intended to. But in meetings late last week, they told the major labels that they were about to launch what they believe they already could – a place for people to store digital files in the cloud. Beating Google and Apple to the music cloud certainly felt good, but it's not why Amazon told the labels about the launch, rather than ask for their permission.

For years, Amazon has been a leader in the cloud storage businesses. Frankly, that business is almost certainly far more profitable than selling 99 cents downloads. So Amazon decided to launch this week because of their belief – and willingness to protect that belief in court if necessary – that storing digital files in the cloud doesn't require any different licence than storing them on your computer's hard drive.

Amazon does want to cut licensing deals with the labels. In fact, I'm told that they're working to right now. But their doing it to make their cloud locker and new music player much more robust.  Not, in Amazon's view, to make it legal.

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5 Comments

  1. Hi, Thanks for these kinds of interesting writing as I were able to discover here. I agree with most of what is written right here and I’ll be coming back to this website again.

  2. I’m still confused as to why one needs a license to play music that the person owns. All the consumer is doing is storing the music. I feel as if this is a typical example of industry greed. (ps–i work in the industry, my job depends upon licensing.)

  3. An excellent question! Yet another reason why things like Creative Commons are gaining in popularity – they do away with confusing and pointless copyright/licensing bs.

  4. The reason is because rather than creating new music that people want to buy, music companies are would like to make consumers pay and pay again, and pay often for the same music they bought 10 years ago. This has been their only business model for some time now. Duplicate, media shift, repackaging rather than delivering new and great music.
    Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to be unfair to the companies, but this is really a no-brainer and instead of fighting it as is their usual mentality – why not embrace the fact that people want to play their legally purchased music whenever and however we want – and should be able to do that legally.

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