Launched in 2012, Amazon Music Importer allowed users to add music to the Amazon Cloud Player. Upon storing your files and music on the Amazon cloud servers, you could access and stream them from anywhere. Amazon provided 5GB of free storage and allowed the music to be played directly from the internet using Amazon’s music player. This eliminated the need for downloading music and could help users save some space on their device.
By 2015, streaming had made its way into the market, disrupting the digital and CD industry. This paradigm shift is more apparent today as services like Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Prime Music have become users’ top choices for listening to their favorite music. With streaming on the rise, users started losing interest in maintaining their collection of MP3s.
Amazon recognized the change and in 2015, the company announced that Amazon Music Importer or Cloud Player would be closing its services for customers. Perhaps the tool wasn’t getting enough users as many had already transitioned to online streaming. There is also a high probability that the tool had become redundant as the company already had all this functionality and more in its Amazon Music app.
The Amazon Music application worked with Mac and PC, allowing users to keep their music up to date. It also lets users access Prime Music, Prime radio stations, and more. Users could also use the Autorip functionality to turn physical CDs bought from Amazon into digital copies. With all this functionality available on Amazon Music, Amazon Music Importer had simply become obsolete.