With the amount of competition in the technology market, it seems at times as though new products are obsolete soon after they are released.
As pioneers in the digital age, companies like Apple, Google and Amazon are constantly looked toward to provide eager consumers with the newest innovations in the never-ending race for the next big thing.
Enter Amazon's "Cloud Drive," one of the most significant advances in digital music in years.
The idea behind the Cloud Drive is simple enough, and it's something that has been talked about for a while. Essentially, the technology gives music lovers the capacity to upload their music libraries to a provider's "cloud" and access their digital collections from anywhere.
Amazon's version of a cloud storage device isn't the first one ever, but it's certainly the most mainstream product offered so far.
The Cloud Drive gives Amazon users five free gigabytes of space to store any of their media -not just music - in Amazon's servers. Music, pictures, videos and documents, Amazon users can upload it all and access their cloud library from any device with a web browser.
The focus of Amazon's Cloud Drive, however, is clearly music. Along with the Cloud Drive comes the web-based Cloud Player, an easy-to-use application, one similar to iTunes, where users can stream their music and sort their library by artist, album, song name, etc.
Zack Zarrillo, founder and CEO of the underground music website http://propertyofzack.com, is no stranger to the fusing of music and technology. Zarrillo said music locker services like Amazon's Cloud Drive could be the future of digital music.
"This specific shift to streaming opens a large portal to the future that I think is going to be a necessary adjustment," he said in an email interview.
While the Cloud Drive is more mainstream and will certainly receive a lot more attention than the cloud technology offered by websites like mSpot or SugarSync, its impact will be felt in other ways as well.
It is suspected that Apple and Google will launch their own music locker services this summer, and competition in the cloud market will make sure that consumers see an evolving product.
"I'm not worried about which provider launched their [music locker service] first," Zarrillo said. "I'm only more excited because I think competition in this particular service will be what brings out the best product."
There are a handful of fine details to Amazon's Cloud Drive service, but a big one is more storage. Users can purchase additional storage on Amazon's servers for about $1 per gigabyte per year. Thus, having 50 gigabytes of storage results in just more than $4 per month.
Zarrillo said affordability and the amount of space available will play a big role in the Cloud Drive's success, as well as how heavyweight competitors match up to the Cloud Drive.
"The digital locker is something that I believe in mainly because of saving space on your hard drive," he said. "If Apple puts an 100-gigabyte limit on their locker, that means that 98 percent of the people in the world that use iTunes won't have to have any music stored on their computer, which means that they will have much more space for other kinds of media files."
While the impact of Amazon's latest development certainly is making its mark on a national scale, it's also being felt in Gainesville.
Ben Westermann-Clark, vice president of communications for the Gainesville-based streaming giant Grooveshark, said the advent of the Cloud Drive is something that might actually help Grooveshark in the long run.
"They're all different products," he said. "For example, Pandora is a huge streaming website but it's different from what we do and there's enough room for both to thrive. Amazon is offering something different from us as well."
Westermann-Clark said all of the attention given to the Cloud Drive could end up benefitting Grooveshark in the long run.
"[The Cloud Drive] has actually brought a lot of attention to the whole streaming world," he said. "It's bringing Grooveshark a lot of mainstream attention that we wouldn't normally see. The way I see it is, competition isn't between providers, but between piracy and everything else."
Westermann-Clark's last comments are especially interesting considering the music industry's stance on the situation. Major record labels like Sony Music were surprised by the launch of the Cloud Drive, saying Amazon didn't acquire new licenses for music streaming.
"We hope that they'll reach a new license deal," said Liz Young, spokesperson for Sony Music. "But we're keeping all of our legal options open."
The ever-present threat of lawsuit is certainly a looming one, but it wasn't enough to stop Amazon from launching its service.
"The record industry is being aggressive publicly," Westermann-Clark said. "The theory is that if they don't take a hard stance with Amazon, then if another big company makes a music locker service, they wouldn't have to get separate licenses either."
Beyond the large-scale scope of the record industry is how actual music lovers will use music locker services like Amazon's Cloud Drive.
Melisa Renea, an English major at Santa Fe College, said the idea of a music locker is something that has interested her for a while.
"As someone who has lost in the upwards of 5,000 songs from computer crashes, the Cloud Drive is a pretty amazing idea," she said. "I had to buy new songs when all of those were lost so I'd definitely use this way to store my music."
It seems as though the Cloud Drive and music lockers in general will catch on sooner rather than later. The only thing that remains to be seen is if storing music in the "cloud" will be the future of digital media.
"Over the past couple years, trends indicate that streaming is the way to go," Westermann-Clark said.
"We've gone from tapes to CDs, CDs to MP3s and iPods, then to streaming. If you have an iPhone then what's the need to download files? If you can sync it everywhere, you can go to a place online, build up your library, and there's no need to carry files. The future is streaming."
