Music producer rains praise on Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player

As a music producer who went through the rapid changes from the "tangible content" era to the "digital content" era I am incredibly pleased with Amazon's cloud storage and personal music streaming services. Editor's Note: Amazon unveiled Cloud Drive and Cloud Player on March 29.

I had conceived of a unique service similar to Amazon's Cloud Drive around 2004. Lacking the funds and expertise to put something together I chose a career path for my music that was far from designing web and app code. After 10 years of composing, producing, engineering and performing I have amassed a very large publishing catalog of music that I own and operate.

Working with pioneers in the content management field such as Chaotic Content, I have seen companies gain success from having accessible databases of music in an online forum. Stepping this up to the mobile device and cloud era makes me very happy to finally be enjoying visions that I have previously had for content management services.

There was nothing worse then dubbing music to cassette tape, almost as bad was burning CDs. Just as bad but a little bit better was travelling from studio to studio with hard drives containing my music, video, and other content. Having a service like Cloud Drive is going to prove invaluable to independent artists and producers in the music and film business for ease of access to massive amounts of content. They can upload their music to the cloud and access it anytime and anywhere.

I found Amazon's Cloud Drive to be easy to set up. Within minutes, I had uploaded almost 500 pieces of music from my publishing catalog. Within the next hour, I had uploaded raw video content from studio sessions and shows and a ton of pictures from shows/events/travel etc. in the past few years.

As pleased as I was with the uploading service it was time to update the AmazonMP3 app on my HTC Droid and see how the actual Cloud Player works in conjunction with online storage. This is where I encountered mild issues. The player organized the music already on my phone but wouldn't load my content from the cloud. Following the in-app instructions, I was directed back to Amazon.com/cloudplayer, which is a different site than for Cloud Drive. Once I filled out the registration info, I was directed to sign out and then back in from my AmazonMP3 app.

At first, the Android app was somewhat slow to load up songs and to play them without interruption over 3G. But upon signing into a WiFi network and/or downloading from the cloud to my phone, the speeds became much better. After this all my content quickly loaded up on my phone, and I was very impressed at the organization of the music in the player and of the sound quality. I noticed slight sound degradation from my original mastered broadcast WAV files, which is equivalent to the sound loss I deal with when importing to iTunes. All and all, I praise Amazon for offering this service, and I bet there will be a major sales spike in the next few weeks -- Amazon is offering incentive of 15 gigabytes more storage space for one year with one album purchase.

There has been some controversy about licensing, and I must admit to having a unique perspective being a music producer. Amazon didn't obtain licensing rights from record labels, assuming that all copyrighted material uploaded was legally purchased by Cloud Drive/Player customer. As far as I know, there is no way to "share" your Cloud Drive unless you give out your user name and password, which I already have done for some clients to go through my catalog. Every track of mine that's original was copyrighted and registered with ASCAP before I uploaded it, so if someone was to steal from me I'd stand to make more from a lawsuit than a direct sale. LOL.

I don't think that Amazon Cloud Drive or Cloud Player will end up as the be-all end-all solutions for other content delivery programs but they're definitely a step in the right direction. As a content provider and frequent traveller I am extremely proud of Amazon/Android for jumping ahead of the pack with this digital storage solution. I am very surprised that Apple has yet to provide a similar service alongside of iTunes. Unless something radically changes, I think Microsoft/Windows is going to lose an incredible amount of market share in the near future as we continue into the mobile device and tablet era.

Seth Barmash has been writing, producing, and performing music since the dawn of the digital age. He has produced and engineered for both the Warner Music Group (Atlantic Records) and the Universal Music Group (Interscope, Geffen, A&M). His career highlights so far include production work with Akon, TI, Ludacris, Janet Jackson as well as remixes for Diddy, Ne-Yo, and Xzibit. Barmash is part of a group of talented musicians, producers, songwriters and engineers known as The Digital Crates. His main future goal is to guide and empower a new generation of music producers and publishers through the rapid changes of the digital based entertainment industry.