Amazon says Music storage subscription service, which let users upload their own music, to be retired on Jan. 15; uploaded music will remain until Jan. 2019
Brittany A. Roston / SlashGear :
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon is ending the upload-your-own-MP3s tier of Music, keeping playback of stored files only through a January 2019 grace period. The move lands weeks after Microsoft discontinued Groove Music Pass and pointed Windows users at Spotify, making Amazon the second major platform in one quarter to abandon the owned-music locker.
The retirement also completes a pivot Amazon began when it readied its $9.99-per-month standalone streaming service in 2016: revenue now comes from subscriptions to rented catalogs rather than fees for storing user files.
First-order effects
- Subscribers who paid Amazon to host their own libraries must either move to a streaming plan or download their uploads before the January 2019 cutoff, since the storage subscription itself dies on January 15.
- Amazon exits the paid music-locker business entirely, folding those customers into its streaming funnel where catalog access, not personal libraries, is the product.
Second-order effects
- With Microsoft already out and Amazon exiting, any remaining locker-style services face a shrinking peer set and mounting pressure to convert users to streaming or shut down.
- The consolidation clears the deck for Amazon's premium streaming ambitions — the high-fidelity tier it was reportedly readying by 2019 competes in a market where rivals no longer offer an ownership alternative.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held: Amazon went on to remove all uploaded songs in April 2018 unless users opted to keep them (the Storage service shutdown), and later applied the same playbook to consumer cloud storage by winding down Drive — repeated forced migrations are becoming a structural feature of consumer cloud services.
- If lockers keep closing across the industry, personal media ownership migrates from user-held files to licensed catalogs, leaving consumers dependent on each platform's continued willingness to host what they bought.
The trend: Consumer cloud lockers are being retired in favor of subscription streaming, forcing recurring digital-library migrations as platforms prune storage businesses.