If you needed another excuse to ditch iTunes, this is it. From now on, any music you buy from AmazonMP3 will be stored on the cloud for free, no storage cap. In addition, you can upload up to 5 GB of your older music for free, and pay a yearly subscription for more storage (should you need to). You can play this music from any computer with an Internet connection or your Android phone.

And for all the Europeans out there: fuck you!

Seriously, the state of digital distribution of music and films around these parts pisses me off to no end.

Don't you guys get Spotify?

Select countries only, but you can bypass that with a proxy.

And using a proxy may or may not be quite legal. I was discussing this with a lawyer friend of mine the other day, and he says purchases over a proxy are completely unknown territory for the law. Might as well flip a coin.

Basically, the primary reason why we get shafted is because copyright across Europe is a complete mess, and has to be dealt with for each country separately; and as there is a preconceived notion that everything east of Germany is pirate paradise, they are not going to bother spending the not insignificant money to set up a distribution channel for us. Whether that is wise or not, I do not know. But it sure is annoying.

You make it sound like Germany, or the European countries west of Germany would be in a better shape when it comes down to digital distribution. I'm not convinced though that a service like Maxdome with a whooping ~1000 movies and ~150 (mainly creepy) tv series for a hefty 23 USD could be considered anywhere competitive to Hulu or Netflix in the USA. And if you want to count a music service like 'Simfy', that's far beyond the belly line :p

Yeah, I know. It isn't quite what it should be anywhere around here.

Well, if they don't want our filthy European money, we'll just keep it to ourselves, won't we?

You can use the Cloud (without the player) from anywhere in world, just use the amazon.com site with your normal log in.

The Cloud Player, however, is restricted to the US of A.

But my money does not entertain me... :(

I guess we have more politicians per capita than any other region in the world (just counting all this embassies) and they achieve less than anywere else. I just want a EU wide customer friendly copyright and all the benefits that these nice services from the US have too!!

Small consolence: at least amazon ships to us. There are countries even worse.

You ought to try the money bathing alternative. It's supposedly fun ;) To be fair, there's a *LOT* of nationalistic thinking involved on their population base, that kind of drastically increases the difficulty when trying to negotiate a common ground.

I lived in Geneva, I seriously doubt anywhere in Germany can beat that for embassies.

On topic, I can't really blame Amazon for this one, it's clearly outmoded laws. When copyrighted goods were nearly exclusively traded in stores it was at least workable. Now it's just a barrier to everybody.

Or, you can just NOT bother with MP3.

Do you refer to streaming or FLAC?

MP3 is small, and on a crappy system sounds as good as FLAC. I wish Amazon.com sold their digital songs in FLAC as well, I would buy far more, but I've never found a reasonable service that does this.

The more I think about this the more I'm thrilled with it, for one reason, Google has offered to compete and Sony is saber rattling over it already. If they sue either company they're in for it, this isn't some small mymp3.com, or whatever that site was called, Amazon and Google have an army of special ops lawyers at their disposal.

Why would I use iTunes at all? It's not like it's the onlt mp3 player available. Windows Media PLayer 11 or WinAmp which plays everything are better choices and use a fraction of the resources.

5GB really is nothing on top of that.

Legally speaking, it doesn't matter if it's 5MB, the point is they're allowing streaming. 5GB might not hold your entire library, but it will hold a lot of common playlists you might access.

And on Windows, even the Zune desktop software is better than iTunes, which is synonymous with "suck". Songbird is probably better too, and it's a buggy POS.