amazon squishes freemium cloud player service

Freemium is a GREAT model, when it works. But what happens when a company gets frustrated and takes a shorter-term view on their monetization strategy?

Amazon's MP3 Player, released last year, was perfect. Simple, functional, flawless sync'ing with android, and has the best android music app I've ever used. On top of all that, they offered 5gb of music storage-usage for free.

Then they got impatient.

Recently they squished up the cloud music player to serve up ads.

Now they're limiting free usage to 250 songs. More than that will cost $25/yr.

Grrrr. That's frustrating.