More on Cloud and more clouds

Amazon Cloud still hasn’t drawn a lawsuit, but the topic of music storage has interested me lately, mostly because we spoke about the copyright implications and Apple and Google’s plans to enter the same market in a class today. Basically it sounds as if Apple and Google are looking to do almost the same as Amazon in the cloud storage department, but unlike Amazon they want to license with the music industry to gain a few advantages. Here’s the differences:

– Google/Apple won’t require you to upload your music. Unlike Amazon, Google/Apple (let’s call that group “the doom squad”…. just kidding) will scan your music and simply grant you access to those songs from a master calendar. Amazon won’t be able to do that without running afoul of copyright law. This means the process of uploading your music won’t take nearly as long.

– Google/Apple will almost definitely require a monthly subscription. Amazon grants their base package for free and more space for a nominal monthly charge, but Google/Apple will probably have to charge something to pay to the music industry. So the question becomes, would people pay $50-$100 a year for the privilege of having music you already paid for in one location available in others?

The really interesting part is, the music industry wants to use this as a transition to move everything to digital completely: in 10 years, they want to just offer all the music in the world to consumers, free to stream anywhere, for a flat monthly fee. The music industry makes on average $50 per person who spends money on music – a number that’s been rather consistent over the years – but if that number jumped up to $100 or $150 through a massive subscription plan, the industry could finally… stop suing everybody for copyright infringement (well that’s probably too optimistic). It would save the industry in overhead, and if you found any value in that service you’d no longer have any incentive to pirate music. Maybe the music industry won’t be dead in a decade after all.

(I’d also note that a bunch of news is coming out about backup storage startups getting funding lately. One has “we just want google to buy us” written all over it.)