Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"If you're reading this you probably don't need much background on Amazon Cloud Player - suffice it to say that Amazon launched a new "freemium" cloud storage service that's tied into their music store. You get 5GB of online storage for free and 20GB if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, and subsequent MP3 purchases don't count against the cap. There's also a Cloud Player app for Android that can play music files stored on your account - it doesn't matter if they're files you purchased from Amazon or elsewhere, and Amazon has tools that'll upload your DRM-free iTunes purchases to make a switch easy. None of this is particularly earth-shattering - as a loyal Amazon MP3 customer who's almost wholly switched to the subscription-based Rdio, I actually think most of these features are a couple years too late."

Nilay Patel shares some interesting thoughts on what's happened since Amazon launched their Cloud Player service - namely, that the music labels got upset. "How dare you listen to music you bought in any way other than via the hard drive that you downloaded it on"? is their basic message. How quaint. The record companies finally got wise and un-shackled our music from DRM - and I believe digital music sales are better than ever, partially because of that - and now they want to dictate how/when/where we listen to our music? I don't think so.

"In one of the most ridiculous verdicts I've seen, the jury decided that Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first woman who was charged with copyright infringement and offered to settle but decided to fight the RIAA, is guilty and owes the recording industry 1.92 million dollars, or $80,000 per song."

You all know how I feel about music piracy, but there's something completely ludicrous about the ruling here where the woman now owes 1.92 million dollars to the recording industry. She's not going to pay that amount - the article says the RIAA will settle out of court for much less - but I have to wonder if the numbers had been more reasonable in ther first place, the RIAA would have made their point better. This is essentially about grand-standing, hoping to scare people into not pirating music any longer. Did it work? I don't think so - I haven't seen any information about music piracy rates dropping.

"Time Warner Inc's AOL unit, RealNetworks and Yahoo Inc could stand to pay up to $100 million in royalties owed to thousands of songwriters and publishers, after a federal judge established a formula for determining the payments. The move could force the three online services to pay royalties to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) worth 2.5 percent of their music revenue dating back to 2002, ASCAP said. The decision by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sets a formula for potential license fees on songs played by the three online services from July 1, 2002 through December 31, 2009, the trade group said."

I'm a big supporter of the rights of musicians and creators to make a living from their music, but somehow this doesn't quite seem to make sense. Weren't the online music services already paying something to ASCAP, and if so, is this retro-active ruling about bumping up the amount paid? It all seems a bit dubious to me, although there's not enough detail in the article to really grasp the full issue.