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Digital
Amazon locker upgrade results in downgrade
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 22 August 2012
A journalist on BetaNews has noted an unhappy side effect of Amazon sexing up its music-based cloud locker service via new deals with the big music companies: a serious downgrading of the free-to-use option.
As previously reported, Amazon originally launched its music locker service, which lets users upload tracks to the web firm’s servers so they can be accessed from any net-connected device, in the US last year without the support of the music industry (somewhat controversially in the eyes of the labels and music publishers).
But last month the etail company announced a new deal with the music firms meaning it can now offer the so called scan-and-match functionality to premium users, bringing it in line with Apple’s locker platform, which always involved the record companies (for copyright reasons, licences are required from the rights owners to offer scan and match).
That upgrade though, writes BetaNews’s Joe Wilcox, has seen his free Amazon locker account downgraded. Not only that, but he’s seemingly lost access to the music he uploaded to the locker when first signing up for the free 5GB option last year (which could have been a lot, because Amazon actually provided him with 20GB of space, though Wilcox has been using Google as his main locker).
Moving forward free users of the Amazon locker will only be able to store 250 tracks, and those who previously had more than that will no longer be able to access the music they diligently uploaded (only MP3s purchased from Amazon itself will still appear).
Writes Wilcox: “[Amazon’s recent] email shocked – ‘if your Cloud Player library contained more than 250 imported songs when your subscription expired, you will be unable to access your previously-imported music’. Oh yeah? What happened to that generous 20GB of storage Amazon gave a year ago?”
Of course the downgrade is within Amazon’s original terms and conditions, a 250 song facility is probably a pretty good deal for free, and existing users can seemingly reclaim their previously uploaded MP3 collections if they upgrade to Amazon Premium, which is only $25 a year.
Though, as previously noted, the whole selling point of cloud servers is that once you have gone to the effort of uploading your content, you are safe in the knowledge that content will always be available, wherever you are, providing you have a net connection. And sudden surprises like this (or the more serious surprise legit MegaUpload customers had in January when the entire service was switched off) make the whole concept of so-called cloud storage less attractive.
