Amazon recently launched their cloud service for music, and it was good.  So what it allows is for you to buy music and it automatically adds it to your devices, similarly to the Kindle distribution.  Once you have purchased this, you can download it as many times as you like.  This is what digital distribution should be, instead of that crappy iTunes allowance of one download.  Now industry experts are all a flight with the licensing issues and what the recording labels will do to Amazon since they did this. 

This all stems back to money, and how much the EMI can squeeze from music lovers.  They have long thought that they are the sole proprietors of music and its guardian.  They protect their medium too much in my humble opinion.  What they end up doing more than not is distancing themselves from the people who purchase their product and choking innovation that would make them a ton of money.  It might not let them bleed every last penny from us, but they would make themselves and the artists that they represent rich.  Instead of being human about it. 

What I find really funny about the whole situation is that as the alternatives that are not draconically implemented become more prevalent, piracy declines.  This may be in part because of insane lawsuits that charge a mom with millions of dollars in damages, which you know they will try to get their pound of flesh for the rest of her life, yet I believe it is declining more and more due to easy to use alternatives.  

Time will tell if EMI takes offense and starts to go after Amazon.  Amazon is sure to have had a long legal discussion and plan drawn out just in case there are any issues.  I personally cannot see how the EMI can attack Amazon logically (yet it seems the law is rarely about logic).  It is your product, digital none the less, but your product.  You can put your product on the cloud, for you only, so you can share it on other platforms.  There are a lot of other players already in this space, but none of them are as big a target as Amazon, nor as accessible as Amazon.  I just hope that Amazon is not a soft target and this can be a shift in the way digital music is distributed to the world.  I will assure you, Apple, Google, Microsoft and a plethora of other big and small players are watching how this plays out so they can start doing the same thing.  There are a ton of sharing sites in the cloud, and they would love to have that kind of opportunity too.

What do you think?