Most of the biggest music companies in the world are being courted by Amazon.com Inc. as it is looking to sign new licensing deals with these companies in order to improve its newly launched cloud music database service, said two inside sources. These sources also revealed that these talks are also meant to improve the fast heating situation in which many of the major record labels have expressed their disapproval at the new service which was launched this Tuesday as Amazon hadn’t consulted with them prior to the launch. It was only last week that the technology company started notifying these companies about their plans to launch the cloud service.
A spokeswoman for Sony Corp’s Sony Music Entertainment said on Tuesday that Sony was disappointed with the way Amazon had acted and it was keeping their legal options open if needed. The service called Amazon Cloud Drive currently requires users to copy the songs on their music collection to a remote server, from which they can later play back those songs on any other PC with an internet connection or on Android devices.
Experts on intellectual property have agreed that there probably shouldn’t be any need for Amazon to get new licenses from the music companies for offering a setup which was so passive. One of the features that has been allowed by Amazon since Tuesday which is being scrutinized by lawyers from record companies is that they allow up to five people to listen to a song at any given time. However, even if the system manages to get a green light from the legal authorities, it should eventually become very inefficient for Amazon to dedicate such large amounts of storage space for it. The company will have to work out a better approach towards the concept if it wants to keep it alive for the upcoming years.
