TechStuff Tackles the Amazon Cloud Player

the songs. You chose that we're talking about clouds. That's true. We were going to talk about Amazon's much heralded new cloud service because it's completely unlike everything else that came out that's a cloud service. Yes, except well there is there is one unique element, or at least it's it's new. It's new enough to talk about, right, It's not like it's something it is, uh that also has been done

over and over again. Actually, I think the thing is I wanted to talk about this because so many people are talking about it, um because it isn't for the most part, all that groundbreaking in a lot of ways, but people are still talking about it as though it were a revolutionary thing and I think in a way, it's the mindset behind it and the fact and that one that one special instance, and if you're if you're new to what we're talking about and have absolutely no

idea what we're prattling on about this point, it's called cloud drive, and that's a a cloud based service. And we talk about cloud we're talking about internet storage. So rather than using the hard drive on your computer or an external hard drive that you plug in your computer or maybe even on your network at home, the files that you save to this service are going across the Internet to be stored on in this case, Amazon's hard drives computer. And the reason you would do this, there's

actually several reasons. One would be that, well, you know, there's most of us just have so much storage, and you start to accumulate enough stuff. You have, as George Carlin would say, not enough places to put your stuff, So you gotta find more places for all the stuff you got, and uh, that's a great routine. And uh, and that cloud storage is a great way of finding places to put your stuff. So you are effectively putting your stuff in someone else's house, that's one thing. So

you're getting your you're able to offload storage. But another reason you might like it is because, unlike some of us, these cloud storage companies tend to have lots of of backups and redundancy built into their systems so that if something goes wrong, you don't lose your data. Because if my hard drive crashes, I lose that stuff. Right, anything that's stored locally on that hard drive, I could potentially lose forever. That's right. There's also leads us to the downsides.

And if you have been listening to tech stuff for years now, you know that we when we talk about cloud computing, in cloud storage, we were going to talk about privacy. When you have multiple copies of your information stored on someone else's computers, um, then there is the possibility that that information could fall into someone else's hands and if it's not encrypted, could be or or not encrypted well enough, um or if the person is really

really good at cryptography. Yeah, and we're talking crazy good because most of the cryptography that's been use out there is is strong enough to defeat all but let's say a government's uh resources, Yeah, the most the most sophisticated uh crackers. But yeah, I mean, if if you're storing

this information out there and it's not secure enough. There's a possibility that you could put your financial records, or genealogical information or kids photos are all kinds of stuff that you probably don't want everyone else to have in the hands of someone else, and that that is why

some people avoid using cloud storage. And there's also the chance that there's also the thought that if there were any loss of connectivity for some reason, you would then have you wouldn't have have access to your data anymore. I recently had this problem. It's a big pain in

the neck. Yeah. So if you use cloud storage for lots of your stuff and you for some reason, maybe you forgot to pay a bill, or maybe the actual internet service provider has suffered some sort of failure and for some reason or another you're not able to access the Internet, well, then you're not able to get to all of your files because they're stored remotely on some other server. Right now, for consumers, that is you and me,

or at least most of us. Um we already have lots of really well known and pretty well regarded services, people like dropbox and Sugar Sinc And Box dot net, people like even even things like Google Docs. If you're talking about specific types of documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and are all cloud services? Yes, and and Amazon has been doing this too for a long time, offering uh, storage

solutions primarily to two companies corporate customers. Yeah, but this is so you at this point you might say, so, yeah, what what's what's so new about this? Uh, this cloud drive allows you to store all kinds of documents. You could put word processing files up there, anything that could really any file format pretty much. But they really intended to serve as a music locker. Yeah, this is the brilliance of this system. So Amazon's had this cloud storage

in place for a couple of years. In fact, when we started talking about cloud storage, probably two years ago when we were first starting the podcast, Amazon was one of the big providers that was leading the way in cloud storage, but they had not happed into the general consumer until they thought, why don't we combine this cloud storage with our amazing MP three store where you can buy m P three's from Amazon, and we can package it in such a way that it's really attractive to

Amazon customers and make a service out of it. So it's not just a storage service, but is some sort of transmission service as well. And it's it's they. I mean, you couldn't have asked them to do a better job. They not only did they really make a big splash in the news, they scooped other major companies that are trying to do something similar right now. And when I say major companies, I'm talking Google and Apple. Yes, yes,

um Now there are again other music locker sites. And what a music locker is, um, I think primarily of groove Shark. There are many others, but um including one that was purchased by Apple um la la. But what it is is you start an account. And I've I've always been kind of weirded out by this because it seems so like sort of a dubious uh in terms of licensing sort of situation. You sign up for an account with one of these services, and the service allows

you to upload your own music to the service. Now, in the case of groove Shark, you can actually listen to the music that other people have uploaded on the site. And that's where it really gets kind of complicated. Well, the artists are getting a cut, according to groove Shark, so you know that that apparently, and they have licenses with the major music labels. So they are are apparently okay, but it took me a little while to go. I

am not going to get in trouble for using this site. Um, but yeah, if you if you use Amazon's cloud drive, you can upload music that you have purchased on encrypted music in a c r M P three format. If you buy music from Amazon from that MP three store that you mentioned a moment ago, it'll go straight to the cloud. It goes straight to the cloud and you can you can download it, but you can also find it in your your cloud store cloud storage. Yeah, here's

the brilliance of this. So let's say that you decided to purchase an album from from Amazon dot com and it goes into your cloud storage. You can download it immediately if you want to. You can wait, you can go download it off another computer. All you have to do is log into your Amazon dot Com account. So and as soon as you have an Amazon dot Com account, you get five gigabytes of storage space and in a cloud drive for free. Yes, just for being an Amazon

dot Com customer. You don't have to purchase anything. No five gigs for free. If you buy an album, you get twenty gigs for free for a full year. Yes, and uh, all you have to do is then what you would have to renew it from that point and essentially Amazon charges a dollar a gig per year. Actually is it? Do you have to buy a full album? I think if you, I think you have to buy

a full album to get the twenty gigs. That was very smart on their on their part, because somebody was suggesting that you could go buy one of the sixty nine cent songs, get twenty gigabytes for a year for sixty cents. This is the other really cool thing about it though, Right, Okay, so you have that five gigabytes of space. That's a lot of space. That's up to a thousand songs, more or less depending upon the you know, how how high quality they are and how long the

songs are. I mean, granted, if it's meat loaf, it's probably more like six songs. Because that dude just never never shuts up. Man. I would do anything for love, but I won't shut up. I love. By the way, I was both the food item and the artist. Oh man, so happened to Saturday night? Anyway? Yes? Sorry, I got a little off track there. Where was I? I had

five gigabytes of storage. So you've got five gigabytes of storage starting off for free, right, but if you buy a song for Amazon dot Com, it doesn't count against the five gigabytes. That's right. Yeah, any any music that you buy from Amazon dot com. Say you have a your your accounts empty, and you're getting ready to buy an album. Yes, uh so you you're you're going to get the twenty gigabytes. And let's say it's it's nice round number that the album is a hundred fifty megabytes

worth of music. That hundred fifty megabytes does not count toward the twenty gigabytes. That's conditioned to You can just keep buying music from Amazon dot com and you will never fill up that space no matter how many gigs of music you have if you bought all right, So, twenty gigabytes holds about four thousand songs more or less unless it's meat loaf and already did that joke. Anyway, So twenty gigabytes about four thousand songs. So let's say

you bought five thousand songs. You went on a spree. Okay, okay, so you bought five thousand songs. Well, because Amazon dot Com does not count those against your your cap. You can have all those in your cloud drive if you bought them all from Amazon dot Com, unless, of course, you bought them before, right, that's a problem. If you bought them before, then what you're doing is you're uploading

to the cloud and that does count against your cap. Yeah, because I do have a few albums that I have purchased from Amazon service, and I I don't get those retroactively added to my locker with Amazon doesn't know that necessarily that although I'm sure there's some code in there somewhere, but Amazon does not quote unquote know that which MP three's were ripped from the CD, which ones were purchased

through iTunes. Of course that wouldn't be an MP three necessarily, but uh, or which ones were bought off Amazon dot com or some other service. So you even if you did buy other songs from Amazon dot Com before, those are not going to be grandfathered in. So here's where it starts to become a music specific effort, because um, you know the services that I mentioned earlier, people like

Dropbox and box dot net and sugar Sinc. They the basic accounts with those the free accounts generally about two gigabytes worth the space, um, and they don't discriminate what kind of file types you can save in their right and and um, well i'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. And yes, those of you who have accounts with Dropbox will know that if you get other people to sign up in use your name,

than you get extra space. But yeah, starting out, you get to two gigabytes with the space, so you're already more than doubling that. But that this is a brilliant marketing move for their music store because it is encouraging you to down buy and download those uh music files from Amazon's MP three store. Yeah, if the lower prices weren't enough for you, then this will also help. So yeah, that's the big that's the big differentiation there between the

cloud drive and other services. Now, if you want more space other than the twenty gigabytes that we were talking about for buying music, um, you can buy that essentially a dollar a gigabyte. Yea. It comes in increments um, which are D two hundred, five hundred and a thousand gigabytes. So if you want a thousand extra gigabytes you need a terabyte of storage, yes you can. You can buy that for a terabyte of money about a thousand dollars

a year, a grand a cool grand um. So you know, it depends on what you're going to be storing in there, what it's worth you to do that. But keep in mind, although we're talking a lot about music here, you can still store other files in that cloud drive. It doesn't all have to be music. So if I bought an album from Amazon dot Com got twenty gigabytes of storage, I could fill that twenty gigabytes up with video, or I could fill it up with documents if I had

that many. I can't imagine having twenty gigabytes worth the documents. I don't want to either or pictures. I mean, you can fill that stuff up anyway you want. And of course you can keep buying music off Amazon dot Com and it won't count against that cap um. But there's another element that kind of makes this an interesting and somewhat controversial move on Amazon's part, and that's you know,

the cloud drive. Like we said, not really that that groundbreaking because cloud storage has been around for a few years, but the cloud player, which again not necessarily groundbreaking, but the implementation of the cloud player into this Cloud Drive ecosystem, along with the Amazon on dot Com store, makes us a really compelling and powerful tool. Now, the Cloud player. What that allows you to do is play music that's stored in your cloud drive on any computer that's connected

to the Internet or on any Android device. You just have to download the right MP three app and and you can stream music from the cloud drive to your computer or device. So effectively, this well, for one thing,

it's a huge shot across the bowl of Apple. And the reason I say this because it doesn't It means that you can make your smartphone, you can turn it into an MP three player, and you don't have to worry about filling up your smartphones memory with songs because all the songs actually live on a server and you can have you know, five gigabytes where the songs are more if you've bought them from Amazon, and it doesn't

affect your smartphones memory like your storage at all. Now, uh, I want, I want to make a couple of things clear. Of course, this is similar to many other types of services. You know, the serious are serious XM has you know a player where you can listen to satellite radio over the internet. Um, You've got people like Pandora, you've got last dot FM, you've got Rdeo streaming streaming radio stations.

You can use groove Shark if you are if you are a subscribed member, you pay for a subscription, you can listen to your groove Shark music on your player. Um. And some people have pointed out that you can do this with the regular storage services as well. You can get access to your if you save music to your drop box, you can listen to that music too. But again, the effort is different the way they've structured it, the

way Amazon is structured. Yeah, it's it's somewhere in between, and it is definitely if you There are people I've found in discussions about Sirius XM because I was satellite radio subscriber for many years, who wanted to listen to their own music, so they preferred their their MP three player to a satellite player because they wanted that control. Um. So it's going to appeal to people like that. You don't know, I don't want somebody else programming my station

for me. Yeah, that's great for some people, and I don't want that. It's really gonna appeal to people who either have very specific musical tastes that are not catered to on regular terrestrial radio or even even some digital radio stations. It will also appeal to people like us who are getting older and our musical tastes are becoming cemented and we don't like new things because they scare us and get off my lawn. Hey, I like my

Lawrence Wilke playlist, Thank you very much. Yes, you're cutting edge, living there on the edge of life. I one nanna and tiny. Oh wait no, I'm sorry. So some of some of our listeners have no idea what we're talking about. But yeah, so I barely do. But now that that's the significant different princes the amount of storage space that Amazon is offering people. Now, Uh, I was kind of wondering how I was going to get this app because

I was I'm very interested in this offering. I wrote a blog post about it, and uh, we're basically covering all of that, so you don't need to go read it really right now. But um, the thing is, uh, it's built into the MP three, the Amazon MP three app, which I already had installed on my and you just had to update and I had to update the app,

and there it is the app. Yeah, if you don't have that pre installed on an Android device, and we should, you know, make it clear we're talking about Android specific right now. There are ways where you can take advantage of the cloud storage using an iOS device, but if you want to listen to the music, you actually have to download it to your device. That's one of the other things we should point out. Amazon does not restrict you from downloading this stuff because it's yours, right. This

drive is just a storage space. So you've stored music in this drive, you can download it as much or wherever you like, which that will become more problem later. You have a license to use that music, well, the songs themselves do not belong to you. Yeah, yeah, that's good. No, it's good to point that out. It's good to point that out because that's exactly how the companies do it. I just like watching that vein in your forehead, Throb. But let's say that you don't have the Amazon MP

three UH app preinstalled on your Android phone. There's if you go to the Amazon dot com page and you look for their cloud player, they actually have a QR code that you can use to you know, use if you have a QR code app on your Android phone. You can use that and it'll direct you specifically to the marketplace where you can get that app. And it's free. The app is fhere. You don't have to pay for that. There's no subscription for this service. Um. And here's where

we're gonna get into some of the controversy. So with this player being able to listen to this music streaming, there's some music companies that are concerned that this is violating licensing agreements. Yeah, remember when we were talking a few moments ago, or actually Jonathan was talking a few moments ago about how Amazon scooped Google and Apple. Both of those companies have been known to be working on some kind of effort. Well, in Apple's case, it's more

of a nearly substantiated rumor. They all signs point to the the idea that they are going to be doing something. Google Music has been known about in some capacity for a while, and it's rumored at the time we are recording this, and who knows, by the time it goes live, it may be public, uh that Google is doing a data with its internal employees for Google Music, which is supposed to be a similar service to this, a cloud music service. Apple, of course purchased La La, which we've

mentioned I think several times um. And they are building a data center in North Carolina, very large data center. UM. Rumor has it that it will be used for streaming music and or video. Uh so that's been in the works for a long time. But what Amazon didn't do They wanted to get a jump on everyone else, which they did. They also didn't tell the music companies what was going on, so and didn't get light Well, they

didn't get licenses. Let's say this. They didn't get licenses to do this, which normally the record companies prefer to do, which is why Spotify isn't in the United States as of yet. So let's prepare for a Jonathan rant. Everyone just settled down because I'm going to get going. Mm hmm. Can I go get a cup of water? You can go for as long as you need to. I'll turn a light on when it's when it's when, when I'm done. So here's the deal, folks, here's here's how I see it.

Cloud storage is just an extension of local storage. As far as I'm concerned, that data is your data to the limitations of whatever that data might be, and you can access it whenever you like, as long as of course there's a connection there. It's the same thing that if that if you purchased an album or ripped a c D and that music is on your hard drive. There's no difference. I mean, the only difference is the distance.

Instead of the hard drive being immediately adjacent to or part of your computer, this drive is you know, potentially thousands of miles away. But it's still just storage. There's it's not like Amazon is his broadcasting new music or music you do. You did not yourself put into that drive. That's not happening. It's not it's not taking the music that's in your drive and then sending you new stuff.

You know. That's kind of like what Pandora does. You know, you create a station based upon a song you like, in Pandora finds other songs that are similar, but Pandora pays licensing fees for that because that's more of a broadcast thing. This is really there's no difference between cloud storage and having a server that's a thousand miles away and having a thousand mile long cable connected you to

that server to listen to your music. You could have an iPod, all right, and you could be listening to your iPod. You've got your headphones on, You're in New York City, just so happens, your iPod happens to be in San Francisco. But you've got a cable that goes all the way across the United States of America and you can listen to that. Of course, you're gonna be stuck on whatever songs on there, because your controls are all the way across this country. But that's not the point.

The point being that it's the distance doesn't matter. It's it's storage. It's a it's a drive. It's the same kind of drive that's on an MP three player, that's on smartphone, that's on a computer. There is no difference there. There's they're not creating this performance. It's just you accessing a file. So I'm hoping that Amazon can defend this and come forward and say, hey, guys, we're not we're not. All we're doing is giving them the tools to listen

to the music they purchased. We're not doing anything else. We're not making you know, we're not trying to go behind your backs or anything. And it's just the same as if they were pushing play on an MP three player. It's just that they're pushing play on a smartphone or on a computer and they're just accessing a file that happens to rest on our servers. But we don't own that file. We sold that to them. Boy, that makes me mad. Are you done? I? I think so. I

need more beans well to be fair. As of right, I think I was very fair to two. As of the day that we're recording this, I have not seen anything that suggests that any of the major players in the recording industry are in the process of filing a lawsuit against Amazon, and I know that they are planning

on having some discussions with Amazon about it. Now. This is the same industry that wanted that that wanted XM to remove the ability to record a show that you were listening on on your personal They used to offer a portable player that you could um record a song. It's sort of like a DVR for your TV. You could record a program on it and listen to it later.

And uh, certain people in the industry wanted XM to stop, which they eventually did, but there were lawsuits and things over whether or not you're allowed to time shift your radio, your satellite radio. UM. So yes, of course this, this is the kind of thing that's going to be UM I think coming out in the next few weeks. As of the time we're recording this, uh although um yesterday, as of the day we're recording this, we're recording this on April Fools Day. As a matter of fact, UM.

Greg Sandoval wrote an article in c NET that kind of surprised me. I had been talking about cloud Drive primarily as a music storage service, but as Jonathan pointed out, you can put anything in there. The movie industry is not concerned with the same issues that the recording industry is because people don't it's not really the service isn't really designed to host video the way it is audio.

There's not The cloud player won't play movies, right. Yeah, it will host it, you just can't access it with the same ease that you can the music. Right. So they apparently are not in the rush to run out and have a talk with Amazon at the moment um because it's not as urgent for them, although you know, I would imagine they will be keeping their eye on it because the potential is there for for them to

add that capability to the player. And make it possible to watch video, um, probably both movies and TV, but

now on a strong connection to your network. In fact, for even for the music, Amazon recommends that you use a three G or better connection, so we're talking three G, four G or Wi Fi connection in order to have a satisfying experience listening to the music, because otherwise you're gonna have a lot of buff s fring issues where um, you know, the song is just not going to come across very very well because the bandwidth you have isn't

enough to transmit that data smoothly. Um. And yeah, there hasn't been any move for a lawsuit yet, but shortly after Amazon made the announcement, UH, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group both kind of expressed some concerns, and in fact, Brian Garritty from Sony said, we're disappointed by their decision to launch without a license, which at least suggests that they feel that a license would be necessary for you to access your file on a hard drive.

If they tell me that I need a license to listen to my music on my m B three player, oh, I would guess yes. That the difference is who owns the hard drive. I would guess that that's no. I'm not I'm not arguing with you, and you're saying, I'm guessing for the music industry that that's the big deal. If you have let's say a RAID at home, that's a ray of independent discs UM for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, UH, which is basically just a U a giant box with hard drives in it.

I'm over way oversimplifying that, but yeah, it's you can access any of those hard drives over your network. They're not part of a computer. They're just a big box of hardners. So let's say you have a massive music collection and you know it's all on this RAID and different discs. If you want to do that, because you

own the hardware, they're okay with it. I'm guessing that for the music studios, they see an opportunity to get another license because you are storing it on or you know, from Amazon, because they are supplying the internet infrastructure and the hardware to you, and that's that's probably the sticking point for them. I think I think another sticking point though that's that's a legitimate point, and I agree with it.

I think another sticking point is that some of these companies have been known to also be working on their own infrastructures that are branded specifically to their labels. Yeah, so get like a company like Sony, and Sony starts building out its infrastructure. Uh, you know, you don't want to have to deal with competition from other other companies

like Amazon. You know, you you want you want your stuff to be safe so that you can sell it through yours and lock people into an infrastructure because it makes good business sense. You know, it's not necessarily the thing that the customer is going to go crazy floor unless they're a huge Sony fan, But it makes sense from your standpoint where you're saying, look, this is a

great business decision. It's a way for us to guarantee that our online music sales are going to remain steady or even grow because music sales are kind of stagnated over the last few couple of years and um, and that's a big concern for these companies. I mean, the whole purpose they're in business is to make money, and they make money through selling music, and if people stop

buying music, that's a problem. So it may be that that's one of the things that they were looking at that that they're they've got a strategy in place to really boost music sales, partially by creating this locked in ecosystem that's only good for one major label. Uh, but if another company comes in and undercuts them, then they no longer have that advantage, right, I mean the music industry itself. We're not talking about the artists themselves, the

music industry, the recording industry. We're talking about the big labels. They make their money from recording the arts, basically going out discovering people they think will sell, recording those artists, packaging and you know, creating the the uh, the recording with the packaging and creating the product and distributing it to people, marketing it to radio stations to get them to play it, um, and then selling bucks of albums

or digital downloads. As you know, because we're seeing those physical album sales, I mean, those are really dropping off. Digital music is also kind of stagnating. So but yeah, I mean, if you put your your yourself in the shoes of the industry itself, it's easy to see why they would be frightened by losing control. And if they see this as a possibility that they may lose control.

Of course, they're going to defend their industry because you know, that's what they do, So it's not really surprising that they would be concerned about what's going on. Then it's possible that they could work out um an arrangement with Amazon. I mean, ultimately, you're right, Jonathan, it's it's not giving music to other people. If Amazon can demonstrate that, hey, look, this is this is highly secure. Nobody's going to get access to anybody else's music. It's no different than if

it was on their own computer. Yeah, if they can convince the recording industry of that, um, they may be able to avoid having to restructure their offering or worry about yeah or or or worry about a lawsuit. So it is very possible that through discussion that they can they can work something out. They just need to reassure people.

And you know, when you drop the news on him, Yeah, I'm sorry what And I should point out that I'm a you know, I'm a real advocate for the consumer because I am one sure, if I were a major label, I probably would have a totally different argument than the one I laid out. Yeah, I mean, it's you know, it's their livelihood, that's what they do. And so I'm arguing for the customer experience, but that's just one piece

of the puzzle. And I recognize that too. Doesn't make me less RANTI though, all right, well let's wrap this discussion up. I think it was a really good discussion. And and Chris does have a great blog post about the Amazon Cloud Drive already, so I would recommend checking that out. Go over to our blogs and and just click on the little tech stuff thing. You can ignore

all the rest. And I'm just kidding. All the other all the other blogs are also awesome, But if you click on tech stuff, it'll just bring up our our posts and you can find the one easily that way on the cloud drive. And I think it's safe to expect that we will see something going on from Google or Apple or both in the in the months to come. So this is uh, they may actually be happy that Amazon beat them to the punch, especially if they get

punched for it. Yeah, if they get pummeled for it, and then Google and Apple can say, hey, let's rethink our strategy here so that we can, you know, we can avoid the pitfalls that Amazon fell into. That is a potential outcome, so we'll have to wait and see. If you guys have any comments on the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, or perhaps you have some request for a different topic you would like to hear, Why

don't you contact us either on Twitter or Facebook. Are handled, There is tech stuff h s W or you can send us an email that addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moral on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it

today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, are you