Music Industry Not Happy with Amazon Cloud Player Launch
When you find out the reason that Amazon was able to beat Google Music and a cloud-based iTunes to market, you might be a bit surprised. See, those other services have been talked about for months upon months, with the main reason we haven’t seen them launched stemming from licensing issues between the companies wishing to instate cloud-based music services and record labels still sour over the demise of physical music sales. Amazon’s cloud music locker seemed to spring up out of no where, so what’s the deal? Turns out Amazon didn’t even bother to get the proper licensing before launching their service, and record labels, as you could imagine, aren’t all that happy about it.
In fact, Amazon didn’t even bother to get in touch with record labels until last week and decided to go ahead and launch their new service while terms of licensing were still being negotiated. It’s a bold move, one that may end up costing the retailer in the long run. A Sony Music spokesperson said, “We hope that they’ll reach a new license deal, but we’re keeping all of our legal options open.”
Perhaps some heat from the music industry and potentially being sued by the RIAA or individual record labels is a small price to pay to leapfrog Google and Apple, the two companies expected to dominate these area of digital media distribution.
[via Reuters]