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Could Amazon's Cloud Drive be an iTunes killer?

March 29, 2011 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

I've been an avid customer of Amazon's MP3 download service ever since it launched a few short years ago, but there's always been one major shortcoming that kept it from the lofty heights of the online music leader, the iTunes store: Once you purchase and download a piece of content, you're responsible for the health and well-being of it. Unlike iTunes, you can't re-download content you've already purchased.

This is an inconvenience but hasn't been a deal-breaker so far — the selection is so great, and the prices are so good, that it's worth the extra bit of trouble to manage your purchased music collection yourself. But this week, Amazon has launched its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services, and while they don't actually allow re-downloading of purchases, they alleviate the management issues and make it less likely that users will lose music they have paid for.

All users get 5 gigabytes of free storage on Cloud Drive, which they can fill up with music, pictures or video. You can download your content as often as you like, and using the Cloud Player, you can listen to your content via the web or on an Android device.

Screenshot of Amazon's Cloud Drive
But here's where it gets good: New purchases from the Amazon MP3 store don't count toward that 5 gigabyte limit (a limit, by the way, that can be upgraded for a few bucks depending on your usage needs). So you've essentially got unlimited storage for your files, provided you purchased those files from Amazon in the first place.

This is a really great addition to what was already, in my opinion, the best place online to purchase music. Now, Amazon, your fans need one simple addition: Retroactively add all of our previous MP3 purchases to our Cloud Drive. Technically, it wouldn't take much, but it would be a great way to show your customers that their trust in your cloud service is in good hands.