[ReignOfError]

Stuff you buy from Amazon can be automatically added to Amazon’s Cloud and accessed from whatever device you want. What’s the difference?

For free, you get every song you've ever bought from iTunes. For $25/yr., you can have every song you ripped from disk, bought from Amazon or Wal-Mart, torrented, recorded yourself, or pirated downloadable from anywhere. That's downloadable, not streamable. If you have lower-quality songs that are in the iTunes catalog, you can download them in 256K AAC.

I can now have any song in my 40GB iTunes library on my 16GB iPhone in seconds from anywhere. It's freaking huge; aside from the convenience, as Mashable put it, Apple has found the first way to monetize pirated content.

[Keith in Iowa]

>>>Apple has found the first way to monetize pirated content.

That is one heck of a way to look at it :)

My guess is the bulk of that $25/yr is going to go to the record labels and ASCAP, BMI, etc. for royalty fees. :)

[F1reEng1neRed]

I’m really not sure what you’re getting at. I can get on my Amazon Cloud right now and either have my music streamed or I can download it to my phone if I want.

Didn’t cost anything.