Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android
Oh snap! Look who just ate Apple's and Google's lunch here? Amazon has just pushed out its very own music streaming service, dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player. Existing customers can now upload their MP3 purchases …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon has turned its MP3 store into a two-sided play: buy the track, then stream it back from Cloud Drive on any browser or Android handset — a structure Amazon's own engineers are promoting through the All Things Distributed blog, which frames the player as an application built atop its infrastructure. The Engadget writeup casts it explicitly as a strike at Apple and Google before either ships a comparable service.
Timing matters: this lands one day after Amazon opened its US-only Android Appstore, giving the company two Android beachheads in 24 hours alongside its confirmed Kindle push into newspaper bundling with The New York Times. Same-day syndication is broad — TechCrunch's pickup already flags that the player refuses to work on iOS, which Amazon attributes to something other than Flash.
First-order effects
- Existing Amazon MP3 customers can upload purchases and stream them from Cloud Drive on the web or an Android device immediately, while iOS users are locked out per TechCrunch's same-day testing — a gap Amazon pins on something other than Flash.
Second-order effects
- Apple and Google, the two rivals the launch openly leapfrogs, are pressured to answer with hosted-music offerings of their own rather than device-sync models.
Third-order effects
- Music labels now face a top-tier retailer shipping a cloud locker with no negotiated streaming licenses on record, teeing up the unresolved legal question of what rights user-uploaded music actually requires.
- If retailer-run lockers become the default home for personal libraries, whoever owns the storage layer — here Amazon, via the infrastructure its own blog ties Cloud Drive to — holds the chokepoint, and OS owners can retaliate by excluding rival players, as the iOS lockout already demonstrates.
The trend: Personal music collections are migrating from local files to retailer-operated cloud lockers, with platform access rules and label licensing as the gating factors.