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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.

36 of 64 comments (clear)

  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 Ksevio · · Score: 1

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

    2. 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.

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

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

      --

      -- Cheers!

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

      Backups are for whimps :).

      --

      -- Cheers!

    5. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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 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.

  4. 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 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
    4. 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 :-(

    5. 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.

    6. 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?

    7. 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
  5. 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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. I keep my music by rossdee · · Score: 1

    on microSD cards

    Fortunately modern tablets support 128GB or more

  10. 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.
  11. 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...

  12. 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?
  13. 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?