Amazon Music Storage subscriptions are being retired
Amazon announced recently that the company's Amazon Music Storage subscription plans are being retired.
The service allowed Amazon customers to upload music to the company's cloud infrastructure. Free users could upload up to 250 titles using the Amazon Music application for PC or Macintosh devices.
Paid subscribers could upload up to 250,000 songs to Amazon instead for $24.99 per yaer.
Amazon accepts new subscriptions to Amazon Music Storage until January 15, 2018. Free users of the service cannot upload music anymore already (the deadline was December 18, 2017); Amazon removed the ability to upload music to the company's cloud infrastructure.
Music that was uploaded to the service prior to the date can still be played and downloaded. Amazon will shut down that option for free users in January 2019.
Nothing changes for paid subscribers in the immediate future. Amazon notes that paying customers retain the ability to upload music and renew the subscription.
Customers who decide not to renew the subscription cannot restart it at a later point in time. The upload functionality is removed at that point, and access to songs is reduced to 250 (the free song limit). Amazon will remove songs over the limited automatically,
Users can play and download these 250 songs for a year after the subscription expires. The songs are removed automatically after the year.
Free and paying customers of Amazon Music Storage can access the subscription settings on the Amazon Music Settings page.
Closing Words
Amazon Music Storage customers who invested time and money in importing their music library to Amazon may want to renew the membership to retain access to the music on Amazon's servers. It seems likely that Amazon will retire the service for good for subscribers.
As far as "data in the cloud" is concerned, it is termination of services like this one, or Microsoft's recanting of unlimited traffic on OneDrive, that makes me wary about any cloud-only based solution when it comes to storage.
It is the customer who is at the receiving end whenever a company decides to shut down or retire a cloud-based storage service. Amazon gives paying customers a way out this time; as long as they renew the subscription, they retain access to their music.
Amazon did shut down the unlimited Drive storage plan earlier this year already.
Now You: are you affected by the shut down? Do you upload your files to the cloud?
I am appalled … I have 5 Echo/Alexa devices. A major function is listening to my own music on them. The only way is to have my music uploaded to Amazon Cloud – now no longer! Makes a mockery of Alexa. Will they offer a solution – like the ability to link to another cloud ?
Death to Amazon. First they killed unlimited storage of paid accounts, now this.
No matter how I dislike Google they offer the best solution for cloud storage and they would never remove features from their premium customers.
Even OneDrive, Yandex and Dropbox are better than Amazon cloud. In fact anything is better that Amazon cloud.
I don’t understand why anyone would use Amazon cloud anyway. It’s not the first time they showed what a crap company they are. They have proved before how greedy they are and how much they suck.
They are very good as an e-merchant, though. In fact, they are incredibly good compared to any competition, online or brick and mortar. At least in my corner of the world.
“I own a smartphone. I like it. Last time I checked it was 7:20 p.m. yesterday. It is not synched to any of my computers or my iPad, and I will never use it to pay bills. The idea of attaching it to my bank account makes me cringe in terror.”
– me too.
Just what I’ve always said about the cloud and cloud services. Here today, gone tomorrow. Y’all are welcome to it. Not for me.
I own a smartphone. I like it. Last time I checked it was 7:20 p.m. yesterday. It is not synched to any of my computers or my iPad, and I will never use it to pay bills. The idea of attaching it to my bank account makes me cringe in terror.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law. If it’s in someone else’s possession, do you really own it? I will put files up on a paid Dropbox account, but I view it as a backup solution, not a streaming one.
I personally never understood the whole “cloud” mentality, actually; not outside of a business collaborative sense, anyway. I’m strange, though. I don’t even own a smartphone. :-) I’m also fortunate enough to be retired; which helps, I think.
Cloud is for lazy people. People just want to access their files everywhere anywhere easily. If you don’t even own smartphone, you’ll not understand why Cloud appeal to those people.
I still store and move my files manually but sometimes it’s easier to just use cloud to access the files between devices.
The smartphone is really the devil’s tool. (Declaration of interest : I don’t own one.)
First of all, it makes everybody oblivious of other people around, and gives them an excuse to be incredibly rude by way of the urgent “need” to check, at all times, whatever is happening on their screen.
Then, it’s a police state’s wet dream. It enables governments to track the slightest movements of all their citizens, and gather an incredible amount of information on their private behaviour if need be.
And finally, it’s the perfect bait to make computer users surrender to the cloud, because if you own a smartphone, then the urge to synchronise everything seamlessly with all your other devices is just too great. Therefore, your privacy and financial independence from your digital suppliers are gone.
“It is termination of services like this one, or Microsoft’s recanting of unlimited traffic on OneDrive, that makes me wary about any cloud-only based solution when it comes to storage.”
Exactly. Do people using this service have a local copy of their music ? If not, can they download it ? And how many days would they need for that ?
First, digital companies try and force us off our computers and into the cloud, then they pull the rug under our feet and push us off the cloud again. How about a little stability, quietness and trustworthiness ?