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Comment by itsnotvalid | Hacker News Reader

As a non-US there is no way for me to use this.

Just put aside that, is it actually any legal reason for using things like dropbox to upload music purchased and streamed for private uses?

BTW that one album/20GB offers only last until the end of the year, and it only last for a year. After that, you would have the habit of using the service but be reverted to the free plan.

However since all the new purchases on amazon are automatically saved without counting towards the quota, I guess that solves the problem for many android users. Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.

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Fortunately for us non-US folk, this Minimum Viable Product also has a Minimum Viable BarbarianWall that's easily circumvented.

In this case, the only step of the process that checks your foreign-ness is the first one, where you accept the license agreement. So if you have a US VPN, you can quickly bypass the wall and get signed up. Then it's open to use directly from there.

Or better still, since it's Amazon, you can fire up one of their handy EC2 Windows boxes in New Jersey, remote desktop in and IE your way to http://amazon.com/clouddrive. It's a few minutes of pain, followed by a nickel charged to your Amazon account, but it gets you in to try this thing.

Enjoy!

Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.

I don't know much about this but cdbaby[1] will do that for what seems like an affordable price. It just takes a bit of effort and sacrificing some profits in lieu of better distribution. I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but it's possible to get music out there if you are an artist. And cdbaby will let artists choose where/how they digitally distribute so artists could just choose Amazon MP3 if they wished.

[1] http://members.cdbaby.com/whatwedo/default.aspx

The thing is, those are not really independent artists and only sell CDs on their domestic regions, or only on their local iTunes store.

> As a non-US there is no way for me to use this.

I'm in Australia and that's what it looked like to me initially too, but after manually uploading an MP3 and then attempting to play it, the Cloud Player then worked.

This worked for me too.

But when I tried to install the Android player it said it wasn't available on my carrier (Optus)

I'm in Australia too, and this didn't work. Was really looking forward to using it to store my music online to play anywhere.

Uploaded an mp3 manually and tried to play, but got the warning of being outside the US :(

As a non-US there is no way for me to use this.

I don't understand these types of comments. I have the same problem with Spotify in the US, but I don't feel the need to share that I can't use Spotify whenever a Spotify discussion comes up -- everyone is well aware of country restrictions already.

The difference is that this is a new product. You are comparing one that came out long before. This could lead to people verifying this claim and hey, people have tried to make it work out of US.

Besides that, I also try to attract people with the backgrounds of the legal side in US, to explain the ground for making this service legal and the issues on fair-use particularly in US.

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