This morning I received an email from Amazon to say “Albums you have previously purchased on CD from Amazon are now available in Cloud Player for FREE”.

It’s always a nice surprise to receive something for free, and when I logged on to the Amazon Cloud Player, yes indeed the CDs I’d bought from Amazon in the last few years were all on there.

Half of all the CDs I’d bought from Amazon were gifts for other people. This reminded me of the nightmare I’ve had in the past with registering my children’s iPod Touch devices, and setting up iTunes for them. Or our ‘family’ Spotify account. Or just buying MP3s for my kids.

All of these purchases for other people are against the terms and conditions of use. I haven’t found a legitimate method of buying music for my kids like the old physical CD method. Perversely it’s easier to download music from BitTorrent for other people than legitimate methods. However, I’m completely against music piracy and feel that it’s morally correct to buy MP3s from iTunes, Spotify or Amazon and then give access to my kids.

Amazon has just brought this debate back to life where all the CD gifts for others I’ve bought in the past are now available for me to listen to via MP3s.

The next step will be for Amazon to offer the same service for videos and DVDs. If you bought a DVD film a while ago, you should be able to watch it over the Internet.

There are systems in place such as Ultraviolet which enable users to watch a film irrespective of the original purchase media. So if you bought a DVD or Blu-ray or Internet file for a specific film, you can watch it on the other media for no additional charge.

This is exactly the type of advantages that consumers want to see from cloud services. In fact, consumers don’t want to know about cloud any more than RAID storage, they just want life made easier, and with additional value thrown in as part of the package.