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So Amazon launches, Apple customers scratch their heads in bewilderment, Android users rejoice and label executives’ jaws drop to the floor as their fingers hit the speed dial to their legal team….

All in a days launch of the “next” digital music service, as well as yet another “cloud” named service - but at least this time, it truly is a cloud service - no need for your PC to be running at home or have a media server humming away.

So far, so good? Let’s start with the Apple story - just as others before, such as Spotify in Europe or Pandora in US) where Apple will scrutinize every aspect of a music service and look to see where they will enhance or add to an iTunes purchase - both Pandora & Spotify stream content that you don’t necessarily own - but at at the touch of an embedded link - you can drive straight to the track on iTunes. That gets the thumbs up from Apple and your App will be approved, still too many web based streaming sites rely heavily on Flash, and while that story will eventually sort itself out, for now at least, it’s an App. While Android can handle flash in it’s native form, an app at least gives more embedded features, functionality, off line capability to at least access selected tracks while your either out of range of a solid 3G/4G signal or your on Airplane mode etc…

Jumping ahead to music labels, Amazon were never the rebels when they launched their initial download store. They never gave the option (and still don’t) to re-download your music should you either delete it by accident or actually buy another computer and want to have your music on that one as well……..

…..and this is where the story really begins. Tripping back to the 1970’s we used to have big 12” vinyl discs called records, and back in those days, as your record collection wasn’t exactly portable, so in came the classic cassette tape, where your C90 would hold 45mins per side of music to put in the car, or the iPod of it’s day “The Walkman” - we have to go back this far, because it was here that the label execs found that the “people” were taping their albums and as such, just created an “illegal” copy. Next up the inner sleeves contained a large marketing campaign, where the traditional skull and crossbones of Pirates, were now replaced with a cassette & crossbones, with the catchy tagline “Home Taping is Killing Music” - the fact that labels were yet to reach their dizzy heights of revenue & sales, labeling the youth of the 1970’s as Pirates, was a pathetic stance, when compared to today’s technology burst, is almost absurd.

So fast forward to 2011, we have the digital evolution, where the Walkman is now a multifunctional device (phone, music, video, camera…) and while we balance between the physical & digital formats - the music consumer, being us, have ripped and stored our music collection so many times, backed up, moved transferred, uploaded, downloaded, lost and then repurchased the limited-tour-remastered-remixed-special-really special-farewell edition copy - it was only time before someone that the public would TRUST, to go through the hassle of uploading your collection to yet another site or store. Amazon however would love to get the ecliptic mix of tracks to help bolster their recommendation engine - to deliver to their ever growing user base.

And there lies the problem, in order to upload your collection, you need to create a “digital copy” now as the years went on the music labels have tried a number of digital rights management & copy protection to stop you from making a copy, and if you are wondering why, a top executive at Universal Music told me point blank, “anyone who is using digital music is a suspect and we must protect our market anyway we can” - the movie industry still paranoid, are spending more money by giving you a disc with that all important “digital copy” they class this as helping you, the consumer get around the tricky “ripping of DVDs” but unbeknown to you, as you put in the “digital” copy it’s gaining information and now your digital fingerprint is on the digital copy, so ad you put this on every torrent site in the world, you’re details can be tracked and traced!

So this is why the labels are up in arms about the Amazon Cloud Drive, there is a home made digital copy, how do the labels know if this is a legal or illegal copy? Then there is the issue of Amazon now storing potentially Petabytes worth of music, which the labels will cite as a risk if hacked, the potential loss is back to the stupid claim of $Trillions, then the final insult is that with sync, the Amazon app can stream and offline store these tracks… and the labels want paid for each and every one again and again and again and again and again and again….

This will run for weeks to come, so let’s keep our digital ear to the ground and see what comes up next…