One of the major complaints about the Amazon Cloud has been about how much they charge for storage space. Indeed, with 50GB of storage space costing $50 (a dollar per GB), the Amazon Cloud isn’t cheap. And apparently Amazon now agrees, as they’ve announced that now for only $20 (the price of 20GB), you can have unlimited space for music.
That’s right, Amazon is letting new subscribers purchase unlimited storage space for their mp3 and m4a files, as well as music purchased from Amazon, for the price of 20GBs. While the storage space may be unlimited for both old and new subscribers, this special deal is only being offered for a limited time. It’s unclear as to how long this will last, though another new feature that will last for the long run is that now the Amazon Cloud Player can be used with the iPad.
Amazon is no stranger to taking extreme lengths to promote their cloud player, making headlines by selling Lady Gaga’s new album for only 99 cents for two days. We imagine that the motive behind the unlimited space deal is to not only attract new subscribers, but to also encourage current user to upload more music (especially those who got 20GB of space after simply purchasing one album via Amazon). Then, once the unlimited space deal ends (assuming that those who’ve purchased the deal will not receive unlimited space after Amazon stops offering it to new buyers), subscribers will have to pay for the additional space they’ve filled up if they want to. Whether subscribers will choose to continue using the Amazon Cloud once space becomes limited is the true question.
Either way, this is a good opportunity for those who have been on the fence about trying the Amazon Cloud (even though it costs $20 for a year). I’ve been playing around with the Amazon Cloud a lot more since the last Headbangers’ Brawl (where I gave a brief review of it), and after uploading more songs to it, I still find it enjoyable to use. I haven’t uploaded more than two or three albums at a time, but it’s only been taking me a few minutes tops to upload music to the cloud. One complaint that I have is that it doesn’t allow you to edit track information within the cloud. Another annoyance is that it sometimes takes a few seconds for new songs to load once in the cloud depending on your internet connection’s strength (an issue that doesn’t occur again after its first play). Even those issues, though, aren’t that much of a hassle.
With that said, I’m still not entirely sure that I want to upload all of my music to the Amazon Cloud, despite now having unlimited space (after having 20GB). A main reason behind this uncertainty is because I already have most of my music on my iPod, but another reason being I simply don’t want to end up paying $50 for more space once the unlimited offer ends. Plus, I don’t even know if I’ll end up paying $20 once my year plan runs out (I only got that much space from buying an album on Amazon). Then again, I could end up falling in love with the Amazon Cloud by the end of the year. Guess it’ll all come down to how the competition (iCloud/iTunes Match, and even Spotify) is able to compete with the Amazon Cloud.
We’ll keep you posted if more develops regarding the Amazon Cloud’s new unlimited space deal.
