Amazon Cloud Drive: Migration Reality

<![CDATA[Amazon Cloud Drive: Learn More. Click the link and consult the pricing table at the bottom of the page. Go ahead, I will wait. All future media purchased from Amazon will be stored free on the service, but it is the migration costs I’m looking at here.
Cloud Drive is “free” — that is you can store 5 GB of music, about 1,000 songs or 20 minutes worth of HD video before paying for additional storage. I looked up what it would cost to store my 1.6TB iTunes library: $1,600 a year.
My Zune library files, both the music I’ve purchased and the albums I listen to, are stored and accessible as part of the music subscription service.
If I were to embrace Cloud Drive as my media storage service, I’d be adding about $1,900 a year to my media costs in order to migrate my current collection to the Amazon service.
The everywhere-access of cloud storage is a great user experience, but not if you have to count storage costs by increments of hundreds of dollars a year. Amazon needs to assess the value of a heavy media buyer over their lifetime and recognize that zero-cost migration is the price they will pay to get a shot at a new customer in in this environment.]]>