So I have just bought some new music from Amazon (the utterly fabulous CN Lester, and some new kid called Lady Gaga who I understand is quite popular). When it came time to download the albums, something new happened. Instead of telling me to use the downloader, Amazon tried to persuade me to save the files to “the cloud” instead. Apparently this is free and means I have an offline backup of my data.

Well, you know, I have offline backups anyway, so no worries on that account, but what about other people? Here’s what I think happens. You save your MP3 files to “the cloud”. What that means is that they stay on Amazon’s servers. Every time you want to play them you have to stream them. Someone will want to charge you for the bandwidth usage. And Amazon will be trying hard to persuade you that it is much better to pay-per-play than to buy the songs outright. In any case, the mp3 files never get onto your PC, they stay in “the cloud”. And we all know how transient clouds can be, right?

I downloaded the files onto a local computer. I feel like I own them now.