"Impetuosity and audacity," wrote Machiavelli, "often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve." If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word "Amazon".
The proximate cause of all this corporate spleen is the launch last week of Amazon's Cloud Drive service. At first sight, it seems straightforward: it looks like a digital locker in which one may (for a fee) securely store one's digital assets in the internet "cloud". "Anything digital, securely stored," runs the blurb, "available anywhere." The first 5GB of storage is free, with more available at an annual cost of a dollar per gigabyte. Upload files to your "cloud drive", where they are stored online and from where they can be accessed by any device that you own.
So far, so innocuous. It's not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon CloudPlayer which goes along with the digital locker. If you buy music from the company's vast MP3 store, then it's stored for free in the locker, whence it can be streamed to your computer – and, more importantly, to any Android phone or tablet via a special app created by Amazon. You can also upload the contents of your music library to Cloud Drive (though you will have to pay for space over 5GB). This means users will be able to stream "their" music for free.
Watching these developments, the musician David Bowie must be feeling a warm glow of justification. In 2002 he predicted that music would, one day, "become like running water or electricity". Bowie had recognised that iPod users were, in effect, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unsafe. In a comprehensively networked world, he surmised, people would eventually become more relaxed about carrying their own bottled music: when they needed it, they would just get it streamed from the network.
For Bowie's prediction to become reality, four things had to slot into place: ubiquitous mobile broadband connectivity; internet-enabled mobile devices; cloud storage services; and appropriate business models and licensing arrangements that would support music-like-water services. In recent years the first three have arrived – which is how Spotify, the first major music-streaming service, got going. Spotify has made good progress in Europe (where it has more than a million paying subscribers), but it has made no headway in the US, allegedly because of the music labels' suspicions that licensing streaming services might not yield enough revenue.
Behind the scenes in the US, though, there has been frenetic activity, with Apple, Google and Amazon racing to get into the streaming business. Apple has cloud services, customers who are used to paying for music, a good range of mobile devices but no licensing deal for streaming. Google has terrific cloud services and millions of Android devices but no music store customers and no licensing deal. Amazon has cloud services, a music store, paying customers, a terrific e-commerce operation, and access to Android devices. But it also had no licensing deal with the record labels.
Which brings us back to Machiavelli, impetuosity and audacity. In launching its Cloud Player, Amazon has cocked a snoot both at its rivals and at the music business. The more one looks at it, the more exquisite the competitive dilemmas of its opponents now seem.
The record companies will find that Amazon's size, reach and dominance of online retailing will make it difficult to bring to heel. Apple is confronted with a rival that is much stronger in cloud computing, already operates a big music store and has access to the zillions of affordable Android phones that greatly outnumber Apple's expensive iDevices. Google is without a music store, popular e-commerce system or a licensing deal – and lacks even an exclusive grip on the Android system it spawned. Stay tuned for the greatest spectacle since the Colosseum closed for business. And all because people don't like bottled music.
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