Amazon getting cloud-music rights, may match iCloud (scoop)
Amazon executives are close to striking license deals with music studios to cover the company's cloud music service, numerous music industry sources told CNET. — Amazon already has reached agreements with Universal Music Group …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Amazon launched its music locker in early 2011, it did so without label sign-off, betting that personal-storage rules covered it while Apple took the opposite path — spending months negotiating before launch, including a cloud deal with Warner Music, a reported Sony agreement, and payments north of $100M to the majors ahead of iCloud's debut.
That asymmetry is now closing from Amazon's side: CNET reports executives are close to deals with the remaining studios, with an agreement already confirmed with Universal Music Group. If the rest follow, the last structural advantage of Apple's licensed iCloud — legal cover for matching songs across devices — disappears, and the locker market becomes a straight features-and-price fight.
First-order effects
- Amazon's Cloud Player moves out of its unlicensed gray zone: with Universal signed and other studios reportedly near, the service gains the scan-and-match rights that until now only iCloud offered.
- Apple loses its differentiation argument for iCloud's music matching — every marketing claim built on 'licensed' versus Amazon's upload-only approach collapses once the majors sign both.
Second-order effects
- The remaining labels (Warner, Sony, EMI) become the pricing bottleneck — each holdout preserves Apple's exclusivity window and raises the rate Amazon must accept, mirroring the publisher divides that slowed Apple's own negotiations through spring 2011.
- Labels convert locker services into a recurring royalty line: what was free-riding on fair-use arguments becomes a licensable product category they can charge every ecosystem player for.
Third-order effects
- Cloud music settles into a structure where no major consumer platform ships a locker or matching feature without label licenses — storage-side copyright ambiguity gets priced out of the market rather than litigated.
- With lockers commoditized by universal licensing, competition shifts to what rides on top of the licensed library: Amazon's Kindle Fire hardware and Prime bundle versus Apple's device ecosystem, with rights holders holding the toll position either way.
The trend: Consumer cloud music is consolidating around fully licensed lockers, as labels convert previously unauthorized storage services into standardized royalty streams across competing ecosystems.