Will Amazon's Cloud Music Service Fly?

March 31, 2011 at 9:00 PM UTC

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This article is part of the April 4, 2011 issue of businessweek.

Here's how effortless it is to move your digital music collection from Apple's (AAPL) iTunes software to Amazon's new "Cloud Drive" music service, unveiled on Mar. 29:

1. Visit Amazon.com (AMZN), enter your user name and password, and find the link that says "upload files."

2. Agree to the terms of service and solve a Captcha, one of those tricky image-recognition puzzles that prove you're an actual human being.

3. Download Amazon's "MP3 uploader" software, which scans the music on your hard drive.

4. Select about 1,000 of the gazillion songs you own and mark them for upload.

5. Wait around six hours for the upload to finish.

6. Download Amazon's separate Cloud Player app for Android to stream that music to your phone, or use a Web browser to listen to it from any PC.

Sounds easy, right?

Welcome to the awkward stage of the digital music revolution. Online song sales have stagnated, depriving the endangered music industry of one of its last remaining lifelines. Yet digital music continues to be a vital battleground for Google (GOOG), Apple, and Amazon to try to lure users to their other devices and online offerings. Now, Jeff Bezos & Co. have boldly tried to leapfrog Google and Apple in the quest to liberate consumers from the decade-old practice of buying and downloading digital songs to a computer and then manually transferring them between devices.