Amazon today announced Amazon Cloud Drive, a service that lets you upload music to Amazon's servers and play it anywhere, including on the web and Android phones.
This is a pretty huge deal for two reasons:
- It's Amazon's entry into the music streaming market, which is new for them. Rumors of one of the big players in online music (Apple, Amazon and Google, basically) making some sort of service like that to compete with Spotify and Rhapsody have been around for a while, and Amazon is launching it first.
- Amazon is doing it without the labels on board. This is a hugely ballsy move. Amazon is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. They need to do something like this as they ware way behind Apple when it comes to selling music online, but it's still audacious and impressive. They have said they plan to seek licenses after the announcement; they're basically publicly daring the labels to shoot them down. Great.
The focus on mobile and Android, along with Amazon's Android app store and Kindle shows Amazon's renewed focus on mobile, which is very interesting.
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