Who’s Right Where Cloud Music Storage is Concerned?

We’ve just entered the second-half of 2011, and looking back at the first six months, we can reminisce over some of the major events that have occurred within the music industry. In March, Amazon launched its cloud-based music storage service, which allows users to store all of their Amazon MP3-purchased music for free, and up to 5GB to store the rest, regardless of where or how it was acquired.

This move immediately sent shockwaves through the tech world, because it quickly became known that Amazon launched the service without any sort of approval by the music industry itself. Amazon argues that it’s not encouraging piracy, but rather giving people space to store their music. According to the company (and me), this is no different than if they were simply storing the same data on an ordinary storage device. The only difference is that with Amazon, the data is stored remotely.

Google followed-up not long after with a very similar service, but doesn’t have its own music store. Rather, its service simply allows people to upload their own music and then be able to stream it anywhere. After all this, Apple unveiled its iCloud music service, one that the record labels did approve, but one of the most unique rolled out so far.

Apple’s service, like the others, allow people to store their music (and other data), and of course, music purchased through iTunes is considered free in terms of storage usage. Taking things one step further though, the iCloud Match service to be released later this year will allow people to replace any song they own with an iTunes variant, and be able to store that through iCloud. Obviously, the implications here for piracy are huge.

If Google and Amazon ignored the need for licenses, did Apple waste millions of dollars? Or are both Google and Amazon inevitably going to be sued? Ars Technica explores this, and gives a good run-down of the history of these locker-like services, starting with Michael Robertson’s brilliant MP3.com site – one that offered the same kind of functionality as Amazon Cloud and Apple iCloud, but was created over ten years ago.

Although there are no real conclusions laid out in the article, it’s still a read I’d recommend. Currently, most people / companies are waiting for court judgement on Michael Robertson’s more recent MP3Tunes.com service, which, you guessed it, offers users the ability to store music in the cloud. If MP3Tunes is deemed legal by the courts, it will set a major precedent. If the record industry is found to be correct, then that also sets a major precedent – but not a good one for consumers.