Assessing Amazon's New Cloud Player

Amazon unveiled their digital locker today. Anyone with an Amazon.com account can currently upload 5GB of material to their “Cloud Drive.” Photos, documents, music or videos can be slurped off your computer and stored on Amazon’s servers.

Once uploaded you can access this content from any computer, and, for music at least, via phones running Android operating systems (no iPhone/iPad access for obvious competitive reasons).

The idea of storage in the cloud is by no means a new one. For documents, Google docs is the undisputed leader in terms of cloud-based storage/access. Flickr and many other services provide cloud-based solutions for photos (ultimately, Facebook is the dominant photo storage site, when you think about it). In terms of personal videos (i.e. home movies, etc.) YouTube, Vimeo and others provide a fine solution for most people.

However, music, and to a lesser-degree movies and TV shows, have resisted easy cloud-based solutions. The reason has to do with copyright law. Owners of the copyright to music and movies/TV shows have the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute those works; leveraging and exploiting these rights is how (historically) content owners have made money.

For Amazon’s service, video is sort of a non-starter for anything other than home movies, because you’re limited to uploading files under 2GB in size; no TV shows or theatrical movies are going to be anywhere near that small.

No, this is a music play, and it’s interesting to see how Amazon is handling it.

While other digital locker services have tried to negotiate deals with the content owners to allow customers to upload music they have previously purchased, and to access it from multiple devices (computers/phones), no one has gained any real traction because of the above rights issues.

Amazon apparently does not have deals in place with all of the content owners either, but what Amazon does have is massive leverage with these content owners. Amazon can theoretically say something along the lines of, “Make a deal with us for our cloud-based storage service or forget about us selling/featuring your products for sale.” Potential anti-trust issues aside, it’s clear to see that Amazon is not your average cloud-based start-up having to cave to content owners’ (often draconian) demands.

Given this, it’s all the more disappointing that, at least in its initial iteration, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player are so lame.

The Cloud Drive works sort of as you’d suspect: you identify the file type, then browse your hard drive and start the upload process. Amazon promises that music purchased from their site doesn’t count against your storage space, but the two albums I uploaded that I had bought from Amazonmp3.com did in fact lower my storage amount.

Even more frustrating, you can’t highlight an entire folder of music and upload; you have to go within your folder hierarchy to the file level, and then highlight all the tracks to upload. This is a long way from the lamented (and purchased by Apple) LaLa.com uploader that would automatically scan your hard drive and match songs on its server with those on your hard drive, and then upload those songs it couldn’t match. The upload process is not terribly speedy; it took me about seven minutes to upload The Decemberists’ The King Is Dead on a residential high-speed connection.

After the upload, you can go to the browser-based “Cloud Player” and take a trip back to about 1999 in terms of user-interface design. It reminds me of Hotmail. All of your tracks are lumped in a window with no album graphics (perhaps they’ve not seen iTunes’ or Spotify’s UI). You can sort by song title, album or Artist, and you can create playlists, but it’s all sort of an exercise in tedium; no UX niceties such as drag-and-drop exist.

Playing music is intuitive, but again, it’s about as bare-boned as you can get—there’s not even an option to open a mini player, so you’re stuck looking at a big ugly UI while your music plays.

None of this bodes terribly well in terms of customer adoption, but what truly shows how removed Amazon is from customers’ wants and expectations lies in their (and others) questionable belief that such a cloud-based digital locker service for music is even needed or wanted at this point.

In an era of constant connectivity, and with multiple services providing access to pretty much every piece of recorded music that a customer could want, why is there a need to “own” your music at all; let alone upload it from your hard drive to the “cloud.”

If, for instance, you have Steely Dan on your hard drive, and you want to listen to Steely Dan on your device or on someone else’s computer, there are myriad ways you can do that—Rdio, Rhapsody, Spotify, eMusic, Napster, etc.—for a monthly fee that will likely be lower than the monthly fee associated with uploading any decent sized library of music to Amazon’s cloud (Amazon gives you 5GB for free, but if you have a music library of 100GB it’ll cost you $100/year to store it on Amazon’s servers).

If you’re like 99% of the population and you just want to hear some music while you’re eating, cooking, reading, working, etc., you’ll dial up Pandora on your computer or phone and let them curate the experience for you…for free.

If Amazon had made this service free (and perhaps they’ll do so for Prime subscribers), and added in some curation elements (which, they’re…ahem…sort of known for) there might be a value proposition here.

Absent these things, and in an era where streaming music is rapidly replacing the idea of owning music there just doesn’t seem to be much point.

George Howard is a professor of Management at Loyola University, New Orleans. He advises numerous music and non-music firms. He can be easily found on Twitter at www.twitter.com/gah650 and on his blog: www.9Giantsteps.com