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Amazon's Music Storage Service Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30 (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the brace-for-impact dept.

Amazon announced last year that it intends to shut down its dedicated cloud music locker. Now, the company has elaborated on its thinking. From a report: In an email to Amazon Music users, the company says uploaded songs will be removed from a user's library on April 30th, 2018. You can however keep any music in the cloud by proactively going to your Music Settings and clicking the "Keep my songs" button. Back in December, Amazon stopped letting users upload new tracks to Music Storage, which holds up to 250 songs for free. The company said at the time that by January 2019, users wouldn't be able to download or stream tracks they've uploaded to Music Storage, so it sounds like you'll still have many months between April and next January to get your music downloaded and onto a different storage platform or hard drive.

64 comments

  1. Cloud storage by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oddly, my $400 Synology server is still serving up my files for over 7 years now. I guess its business model doesn't change and start deleting your stuff.

    1. Re:Cloud storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well aren't you special?

    2. Re:Cloud storage by Ksevio · · Score: 1

      Well my HD died, but my music stored on the cloud was still there so I guess each to his own

    3. Re:Cloud storage by ckaminski · · Score: 1

      I use FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with an external USB drive that I make internet accessible in a DMZ.

      I'm not wasting my RAIDZ space on FLAAC audio.

      Cost me $150 for a lifetime plex subscription to have offline sync on my phone/tablets.

      Screw the cloud.

    4. Re:Cloud storage by tsa · · Score: 1

      Same here, only for a shorter time. These things are marvellous.

      --

      -- Cheers!

    5. Re:Cloud storage by tsa · · Score: 1

      Backups are for whimps :).

      --

      -- Cheers!

    6. Re:Cloud storage by nospam007 · · Score: 2

      "I use FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with an external USB drive that I make internet accessible in a DMZ.

      I'm not wasting my RAIDZ space on FLAAC audio."

      Your acronym generator seems also to be fine.

    7. Re:Cloud storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use FreeNAS, but have Plex running on a NUC with an external USB drive that I make internet accessible in a DMZ.

      DMZ... for people too stupid to port forward properly.

    8. Re:Cloud storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Get new hard drives! They don't last forever!

    9. Re:Cloud storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The same for my flash drives and SD cards. And they don't even require an internet connection to work!

  2. How many by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How many users are affected by this? 7?

  3. Subscribe to Amazon Prime Fresh Music Now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They want people upgrading from the free tier of streaming you get on prime to the more expensive service. Having unlimited storage for your own files gets in the way of that.

    You'll also note that the plex skill wound up as an entirely neutered remote control instead of a way to stream your own files without having to pay for either tier.

  4. Location by afidel · · Score: 1

    Just in case anyone is interested you access this through music.amazon.com, click on your name, and then your amazon music settings. It is NOT available through the cloud drive settings. It also says it will only keep 250 songs, which is annoying since I have 312 stored so I'll have to figure out what I have that I might not want available to stream.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    1. Re:Location by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just in case anyone is interested you access this through music.amazon.com, click on your name, and then your amazon music settings. It is NOT available through the cloud drive settings. It also says it will only keep 250 songs, which is annoying since I have 312 stored so I'll have to figure out what I have that I might not want available to stream.

      Sounds like a lot of hoops to jump through. Me, I run an SFTP server with a freebie afraid.org dynamic DNS hostname. Tens of thousands of songs and no worries about songs being removed. In the event that afraid.org shuts down there are plenty of other dynamic DNS offerings.

      So, yay for the cloud?

    2. Re:Location by ckaminski · · Score: 1

      Or run your own DNS with Digital Ocean for $5/mo.

      Email too if you want.

      > yay for the cloud?

      Yay for MY cloud.

    3. Re:Location by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why?
      On how many devices do you access this music?
      Better yet, how much time do you have to keep all the playlists synched up between devices?
      For gods' sake, just buy a Fiio or whatever you want, a 128gb MicroSD or whatever you can afford, and carry your music with you. Keep the files backed-up on a pc or wherever.
      Why, oh why would anyone need to create a personal music server broadcasting music over the internet? That's just stupid.

    4. Re:Location by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why?
      On how many devices do you access this music?
      Better yet, how much time do you have to keep all the playlists synched up between devices?
      For gods' sake, just buy a Fiio or whatever you want, a 128gb MicroSD or whatever you can afford, and carry your music with you. Keep the files backed-up on a pc or wherever.
      Why, oh why would anyone need to create a personal music server broadcasting music over the internet? That's just stupid.

      No, what's stupid are the assumptions you made and your total lack of imagination for what an SFTP server can do.

      1. I never said my phone *doesn't* have a MicroSD card. It, in fact, does and I use it for this purpose, among other things. Should I be out and about and want to make a change, then I hit up the SFTP server. This is rare, but it's an option. Considering I have a lot more than 128GB of audio tracks, and use the MicroSD card for many different things, this can be useful.

      2. My server handles a lot more than music. All of my media (close to 8 TB) is hosted there on a high-speed link so I can get to it anywhere. This is really handy in some situations, like the last time I went on vacation and it stormed so the beach wasn't so nice. Most players on Linux will stream a file if you can upload it fast enough (which I can).

      3. "Broadcasting"? Do you not understand what SSH/SFTP is used for? The idea is to *limit* access. Copyright remains a thing and I don't care to wind up in a court for "making available".

      You're yet another example of what's wrong with this site. I don't know if you are just trying to compensate for a very personal "short"coming or what, but you are oh so typical. Instead of trying to imagine how something might work, or *gasp* realizing that other people have different priorities than yourself, you'd rather show us how "clever" you are. The problem is, you don't show this "cleverness" by achieving anything. No, you think hubris is a substitute for cleverness. It's not good enough that you win, someone else must also lose. It's why so many who previously contributed good posts have resorted to trolling and shit-posting (and several have openly said so). They don't want to waste time on people like you.

  5. So easy to walk away by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    I'm the 1% who actually used Amazon's MP3 upload feature. But it's trivial for me to uninstall Amazon's apps from my phone, tablet and PC and stream my CD/MP3 collection with a low-end home NAS.

    I'm not sure what Amazon is thinking. They have to offer a lot of reasons to keep me on their ad-laden Music app.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:So easy to walk away by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My guess is they are trying to push you to Prime Music streaming.

    2. Re:So easy to walk away by OrangeTide · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That checks out. Because I have some albums that I bought that now won't play on the Android app until I sign up for Prime Streaming. but if I carefully go into the menus and pick Download I can get around the restriction. Maybe it's a bug, but it's a rather convenient way for Amazon to influence us to buy yet another service from them.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    3. Re:So easy to walk away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To be honest, there are also competing cloud services that offer two orders of magnitude bigger storage for free. NAS is good for in-house streaming, but what if you're on the other side of the world?

    4. Re:So easy to walk away by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      1. My internet is always on. So that in-house NAS is always available as long as my house has power.
      2. At most I would be on the other side of the country. I'm not likely to travel outside of the US and still want to stream over my phone due to the roaming charges anyways.

      Streaming MP3s over free hotel WiFi is not a big deal even on the other side of the world, since unidirectional streaming is not latency sensitive.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    5. Re:So easy to walk away by mysidia · · Score: 1

      Yeah, But there's no Alexa voice control commands to tell Alexa or Sonos to play music from local NAS or from those competing cloud storage services -- It seems like you HAVE to use the music upload service or Spotify or Amazon's Music service, in order to get a song to play by voice command :-(

    6. Re:So easy to walk away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's why smartphones have SD card slots.

    7. Re:So easy to walk away by DivineKnight · · Score: 1

      Which is (sorry) retarded for those of us in more secure environments who want to sync up their MP3 collections before spending 12+ hours in Server-ville.

    8. Re:So easy to walk away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yeah, But there's no Alexa voice control commands to tell Alexa or Sonos to play music from local NAS or from those competing cloud storage services -- It seems like you HAVE to use the music upload service or Spotify or Amazon's Music service, in order to get a song to play by voice command :-(

      Luckily for me, this is a frill I have neither become accustomed to, nor desire. I can move my arm a few centimeters to click/tap on a playlist and this is no problem. Plus I really don't like the idea of a corporation with a marketing department having a plausible excuse for recording sound in my home or around my person. Even if they look nice now, privacy policies have this way of changing without notice. The temptation to do so for a bit more money is too much for them to resist, as history has shown again and again with every other input to Big Data (OnStar, to name just one example). No thanks.

      The only people who *truly need* voice command input are the severely disabled (say, paraplegics). I can understand why this would be a killer feature for them. I really can. For me and almost everyone else, it's just a frill. The upside (sorry but how lazy are you?) just isn't compelling enough.

      An SFTP file server that I fully control end-to-end with no imposed usage/storage limitations, no additional fees, no worries about service being discontinued/reduced, no concerns about songs being removed, and lots of multi-platform open-source clients? Yes, this meets my needs perfectly. My Android phone has an app that can "stream" songs by directly feeding the .mp3 files to a music player. Every other computer I use can do this (i.e. Dolphin/Konqueror in KDE) or just uses sshfs.

      Why would I want to be at the mercy of a third party cloud provider with interests hostile to mine?

    9. Re:So easy to walk away by Grimoire · · Score: 1

      I was just looking at the Plex website since I used to use it and this announcement made me curious. It looks like the Plex server can integrate with Alexa if you have Plex Premium.

      --
      To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
    10. Re:So easy to walk away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fact-checking of a completely obvious reason has now been completed.

  6. And yet again... by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...we are reminded that it's not a good idea to keep stuff you care about in the cloud.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    1. Re:And yet again... by ffkom · · Score: 1

      Sure, but given that the now prevalent generation of consumer-zombies does not care about anything, the "cloud" is a perfectly suited thing for them.
      To my initial disbelieve, I met specimens of that kind who actually purchased the very same song multiple times just because they could not be bothered to transfer it from device A to device B, no matter how simple that would have been.

    2. Re:And yet again... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      And where do normal people put the stuff then? Not us. Most Slashdot users are more than capable of setting up their own personal cloud service on their ultra fast home fibre connections with 40mbit upload capacity. No, normal users. I see a quote above talking about a Synology server, I see talk about not trusting any cloud service, but I see very little talk of practical alternatives.

      Personally I tell the computer newbies to put their stuff in the cloud. Yeah, Amazon may announce that they will remove their MP3s, but frankly the data is still safer there than on their HDD which won't announce its sudden demise, isn't accessible on their portable devices, and is very unlikely to be sufficiently backed up.

    3. Re:And yet again... by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      ...we are reminded that it's not a good idea to keep stuff you care about in *only one place*.

      FTFY

    4. Re: And yet again... by roc97007 · · Score: 1

      Yes, that.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    5. Re:And yet again... by roc97007 · · Score: 1

      Thumb drives? External hard drives? It doesn't have to be NAS. It doesn't take much technical expertise to plug something in and see a new drive icon appear. My mother-in-law can do that much.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    6. Re:And yet again... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Yeah store your stuff on thumb drives. You did teach them how to encrypt that stuff right? How about external drives? How many people do you know that are still using the same drive they bought 6 years ago as their only backup. At least it was their only backup until their laptops filled up and they have a copy of the file anyway.

      If I audit your mother-in-law I guarantee I'll find a dataloss case waiting to happen, and your solutions are part of the problem. You have presented someone with a thing but without realising that what goes into data safety is not a thing but rather management of things. The cloud takes care of the management part of it for those people who think it doesn't take much expertise.

      For everyone else, there's dataloss.

  7. Thanks Amazon by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

    For giving me the heads up yesterday with just a few hours to spare.

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    1. Re:Thanks Amazon by Holi · · Score: 2

      Umm April 30th is a month away.

      --
      Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
    2. Re:Thanks Amazon by wjcofkc · · Score: 2

      I am from the future. I came back to backup my files. In the future, I am the last to find out.

      --
      Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
  8. C2000 storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No it just fails on you completely with no admission of their being a problem.

    https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/storage/synology-denies-atom-abnormal-failures/1/

  9. Cloud+Local storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Or combine the two and stop arguing.

  10. Yet another reason to be skeptical.. by MpVpRb · · Score: 1

    ..about the "Cloud"

    Local storage is best

    Cloud backup can be useful as part of a multi-level backup strategy, but keeping your one and only copy on the cloud is silly

    Yeah, I know this rant doesn't exactly follow from the article, but the idea is still valid

    1. Re:Yet another reason to be skeptical.. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Local storage is best

      For whom? The mum and dad who have all their valuable data on a single non backed up HDD hoping that it is both fireproof and will last forever?

      Local storage is the best for people who know enough about computers to properly manage their data. That makes about 0.01% of the computer users out there.

  11. What do I do now? by gatfirls · · Score: 1

    I only have 6,312 options left for music storage.

    I still have a folder on my archive disks from someone who was losing their HDD and I backed up their 13,000+ song music collection ("I would just die if I lost this") because I had the space so they could come get it back after a new disk/OS. That was 8 years ago, not even a single ask about it. I would imagine Amazon and the others are just a macro version of that, petabytes of dusty storage space that is almost never accessed.

  12. So easy to connect. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    DDNS and VPN. Next question.

  13. Physical media by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is why I still buy CDs and Blu-rays (and DVDs if nothing better is available). I'd still like to be able to watch a good movie 10 years after Netflix drops it and no one else on the face of the earth even remembers that it exists...

    1. Re: Physical media by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They are all probably shitty DRM lossy v0 mp3s anyway.

      Once you go flac...

  14. Yea, don't do clouds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As the cloud server can change the terms when they want they leave you in the dark. My hard drive and three terabyte drives can store my music just fine and I don't need to waste bandwidth. Sometimes a convince is not.
    You get nothing for nothing. Look at Facebook. You don't pay a fee and they sell your lamb behinds to anyone that is willing to buy it. Now that is something for something.
    Google I like because they anonymize the data they collect before selling. It can't be used to target me for political ads for example. Geographics for restaurants when using the map function OK. Weird but OK. Amazon? OK. When I am on their site they are selling stuff; I can opt out for mailing and apps to blitzkrieg me and have. Fairly easy to do. Pissed off customers don't have to shop with you.
    Pink Floyd. 'Animals' and 'Sheep'. Have a listen some time. It speaks to you of how many of us have become sheep ready for the slaughter. Weird as I am not a conspiracy theorist, though I might sound like one. I leave that job to my brother. He is a good check on me being 'normal' what ever that is. I have yet to buy a gun and I am a former Marine. I am retired and never owned a personal gun or rifle. Never thought I needed one. I guess my community is a nice one. He has many.

  15. Re:Your neighbors appreciate it. by wolfheart111 · · Score: 0

    That you don't own a gun, damn walls so thin. Bullets just tear right through them... stray bullets,

    --
    [($)]
  16. I keep my music by rossdee · · Score: 1

    on microSD cards

    Fortunately modern tablets support 128GB or more

  17. Maybe a deal breaker for me by Chewbacon · · Score: 1

    I'm a Amazon Unlimited Music subscriber since I travel a lot and consume music. Some folks say I'm a sucker "renting" music, but why pay for all of those tracks I will get bored with? It gets expensive. On a subscription plan, I can listen to most artist's latest album and have no buyer's remorse if it sucks. I do pay for tracks I can't get enough of and download them to my sprawling library at home. That library also has MP3s ripped from CD that are long gone and not available on the streaming plans out there. That's where the upload option for Amazon came in for me. Maybe moving on to itunes radio, but rumor has it apple is getting rid of itunes and I'm not sure how I'll end up syncing said music to my phone.

    --
    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    1. Re:Maybe a deal breaker for me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But as far as I can tell as long as you press the "Keep my songs" your music won't be removed. You won't be able to add to it but the files you have there already are still going to be there for you to download and stream. If you buy the music via amazon it will still be there as well (even after the 30th or your plan expires). The only songs that would appear to be affected are ones that aren't for sale via amazon and you haven't already uploaded.

      I cannot say I've purchased any new albums since picking up a streaming plan, that may be different for you however. That being said it appears to me that I can load music on my SD card and Amazon music will pick-up those songs as well as the ones in my online library to let me make mixed playlists of my own local songs and songs from Amazon's cloud.

  18. Should have got the CD by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    That music you actually own on a CD is looking like a good buy now.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    1. Re:Should have got the CD by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      well those DRM CDs were a pain...

    2. Re:Should have got the CD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL I remember CDs. What if I want to listen to something besides Pearl Jam?

    3. Re:Should have got the CD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL I remember CDs. What if I want to listen to something besides Pearl Jam?

      Buy another CD?

  19. Don't care. by TrumpThemAll · · Score: 0

    I uploaded a lot of albums that I bought off if Amazon (I like to have hard copies), but I don't care if they delete them because they screwed up the interface on their music thing that it's no longer usable. Looks like AT&T hired the same company to screw up the direct interface. Guess what, I'm not going to be using g them anymore either.

  20. Amazon link to do just that. by grep+-v+'.*'+* · · Score: 1

    link. It's the "Keep My Songs" button in the 3rd paragraph.

    --
    If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
  21. There's no cloud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And always remember: There's no cloud, just other people's computers.

  22. Music Streaming Biz is Turbulent Near Clouds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We have lost:
    This is NOT a comprehensive list (Link anyone?) only a stroll down memory lane. Enjoy.

    SoundCloud, Rdio, Groovshark, Beats Music, Songza, Last.fm, Milk Music, GhostTunes, Sony Music Unlimited, MOG, PonoMusic, Tidal, Napster/Rhapsody, Pandora, Deezer, Groove Music (Microsoft), Walmart,

    You can still rent your music from: iTunes to become Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, Spotify,

    List (mostly) from this Gizmodo article by Christina Warren.
    https://gizmodo.com/streaming-music-services-from-most-screwed-to-least-sc-1793612699

  23. Classic D**k move by Amazon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...so for years Amazon has touted their Music Service as a way to put your music in the cloud. Up to 250,000 tunes for only $24.99 / year. Google has a free deal, but Amazon's player's features are a bit better. I'm a pro musician who has over 15,000 tunes from my own library on Amazon Music. I'm downloading right now to transfer over to Google Play Music. I guess it's great to have a backup, but being forced off at the end of my subscription (August 2018) is less than optimal. Makes me wonder if any of the cloud services can truly be trusted over the long haul with data. There seems to be too many opportunities to lose data from a cloud provider through failure to read the fine print, keep the subscription up, or having a cloud vendor go offline because it's not part of their business model anymore. Scary!

  24. just mp3? by Mozai · · Score: 1

    "Will Remove MP3 Files on April 30"

    So my ogg, flac, opus and m4a files will remain? or does someone think any audio file is automatically an mp3 file?