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Are you ready to hand over your music to Amazon?
FIRST music went digital, then we started downloading it. Soon it may be time to let go altogether.

Pop songs may have moved from vinyl to tape to CD and now iTunes, but one thing has always remained more or less the same.

That's a sense of tangible ownership.

Even MP3s, for the most part, are stored on a device that you can hold in your hand — an iPod, or a laptop, or an external hard-drive.

But the next big shift in music consumption may be to let go altogether and let someone else store your favourite albums for you.

Amazon last week launched a new application called Cloud Player, which has already started shaking up the music industry.

The record labels seem to hate it, tech journos are going nuts for it and Apple is no doubt very, very worried.

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Why? Because it has the potential to replace iTunes.

Cloud Player relies on a new Amazon service called Cloud Drive which allows you to keep your files on the internet instead of your computer.

What the Player does is let you stream music from the Drive to any computer with a web browser like Internet Explorer, or to Android smartphones like the HTC Desire.

When you buy new music from Amazon, you don't need to download it. It just goes straight to your Cloud Drive.

However it's not only for music available on Amazon. You can also store your own song library on there.

The Cloud Player makes that easy to do by scanning your computer for songs — including those on iTunes — and uploading them to the Drive for you.

You get 5GB of space free when you sign up — enough for about 40 albums — and up to 1000GB if you want to pay for it.

Music bought from Amazon is hosted for free and doesn't count towards your limit.

Listen from anywhere

The big selling point of Cloud Player is that it frees up your songs from the limits of a single computer.

Using iTunes, you can authorise several computers to play songs purchased through the iTunes Store — but in some ways, they are still locked to the one you downloaded them to.

For example, if you were to buy a new computer, the first thing you might do is load iTunes and try to download all the songs you'd purchased again.

No dice.

You have to go back to your old computer and transfer them to the new one manually, by burning a CD or moving them over a network.

With the Amazon system, your music will always be there on Cloud Drive no matter which computer or Android phone you're using.

The downside is that you'll have to be connected to the internet to listen to it, and it could eat up your download quota.

The other downside, for some, is having to say goodbye to the idea of music as something you can store on the shelf or even your own computer.

Australians won't have to tackle that decision for a while. The Cloud Player is only available in the US for the moment.

However it's only a matter of time before Amazon's service, or one like it, hits our shores.

Both Google and Apple are thought to have been working on similar services for years and are expected to launch them soon.

There are also a number of start-ups doing the same thing, though they don't have the same clout or reach as the tech giants.

In December 2009, Apple purchased an online music store called Lala which had similar features to Cloud Player. It was shut down in early 2010.

Meanwhile, details of Google Music have been trickling out for the past year — but it has yet to see the light of day.

Some experts think Google and Apple could be waiting to see how Amazon's new service fares in the market before launching their own versions.

Cloud Player has already raised the hackles of at least one major record label and it looks like there may be a legal battle in the future.

Shaking up the industry

Not only has Amazon beaten its rivals to the punch with Cloud Player, it's also issued a challenge to the music industry.

When Cloud Player was launched, it was reported that record labels such as Sony Music had been given just one week's prior notice.

That snub no doubt led to the cool public response from Sony, which was, more or less — we've rung the lawyers.

"We're keeping all of our legal options open," a spokesperson told Reuters the day Cloud Player was unveiled.

Sony's beef was that Amazon hadn't struck a licensing deal with the company to stream music by its artists, meaning it wouldn't get any money from people using the new service.

Amazon's response was blunt — we don't need to strike a deal.

"Cloud Player is an application that lets customers manage and play their own music," a spokesperson told Ars Technica.

"It's like any number of existing media management applications. We do not need a license to make Cloud Player available."

Amazon's argument is that it only stores music that its users already own, and therefore already have the rights to play.

"The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive," the spokesperson said.

Because Cloud Player doesn't include the ability — officially, at least — to share songs with other users, Amazon may dodge some of the legal problems faced by other services.

Music streaming and sharing website Grooveshark was sued by EMI in 2009, before reaching an agreement to pay licensing fees to the label. It has since been sued by Universal as well.

EMI did take legal action against a service similar to Cloud Player — which didn't allow sharing — called MP3tunes in 2007, but it lost the case and was not allowed to inspect the files stored by users.

If Amazon does manage to get away without deals with the major labels, it will also distinguish Cloud Player from its rival across the Atlantic, Spotify.

Spotify, which has up to 10 million users but is only available in Europe, offers unlimited streaming of songs — but only those covered by licensing deals.

Spotify users also have to sign up for a paid account to stream music on their phones, while the Cloud Player app is free.

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