Phenquestions
Amazon announced recently that the company's Amazon Music Storage subscription plans are being retired.
The service allowed Amazon customers to upload music to the company's cloud infrastructure. Free users could upload up to 250 titles using the Amazon Music application for PC or Macintosh devices.
Paid subscribers could upload up to 250,000 songs to Amazon instead for $24.99 per yaer.
Amazon accepts new subscriptions to Amazon Music Storage until January 15, 2018. Free users of the service cannot upload music anymore already (the deadline was December 18, 2017); Amazon removed the ability to upload music to the company's cloud infrastructure.
Music that was uploaded to the service prior to the date can still be played and downloaded. Amazon will shut down that option for free users in January 2019.
Nothing changes for paid subscribers in the immediate future. Amazon notes that paying customers retain the ability to upload music and renew the subscription.
Customers who decide not to renew the subscription cannot restart it at a later point in time. The upload functionality is removed at that point, and access to songs is reduced to 250 (the free song limit). Amazon will remove songs over the limited automatically,
Users can play and download these 250 songs for a year after the subscription expires. The songs are removed automatically after the year.
Free and paying customers of Amazon Music Storage can access the subscription settings on the Amazon Music Settings page.
Closing Words
Amazon Music Storage customers who invested time and money in importing their music library to Amazon may want to renew the membership to retain access to the music on Amazon's servers. It seems likely that Amazon will retire the service for good for subscribers.
As far as "data in the cloud" is concerned, it is termination of services like this one, or Microsoft's recanting of unlimited traffic on OneDrive, that makes me wary about any cloud-only based solution when it comes to storage.
It is the customer who is at the receiving end whenever a company decides to shut down or retire a cloud-based storage service. Amazon gives paying customers a way out this time; as long as they renew the subscription, they retain access to their music.
Amazon did shut down the unlimited Drive storage plan earlier this year already.
Now You: are you affected by the shut down? Do you upload your files to the cloud?
