Cloud Report: Apple, Amazon, SoundCloud

Life in the clouds.

While we’ve been writing about Apple‘s cloud music service – and the recent coup of signing Warner Music to a licensing deal – on Wednesday GigaOm reported that the Swedish company Xcerion was putting their domain iCloud.com up for sale, reportedly for around $4.5 million. Xcerion was running a storage cloud service off the domain, but has now rebranded the service as Cloudme. Today, AllThingsD has confirmed that Apple is the buyer, though the price remains unspecified. iMac. iTunes. iPod. iPhone. iPad. iCloud. Welcome to the future.

It appears all is not well in Amazon‘s Cloudland Canyon. Amazon surprised competitors and the music industry by unexpectedly launching music streaming and storage locker services in March. Those services – which had not obtained licenses from music publishers and record labels – were met with scorn by the industry. Now, Amazon is dealing with a public relations nightmare in another of their cloud-related business matters. Amazon Web Services, which provides a range of cloud-based services to companies like Foursquare, The New York Times, and Reddit, reported an ongoing failure last week, affecting scores of companies. AllThingsD has several lengthy analyses of the debacle. Amazon has apologized for the issue, but at a time when Amazon would hope to be treading lightly in the cloud, a public outrage of this nature surely doesn’t bode well.

Last up, in a bit of optimistic cloud news, the Berlin-based music startup SoundCloud tells VentureBeat about an idea for “social sounds,” or a sort of Twitter or Facebook status update with sound. CEO Alexander Ljung also says it’s time to redefine the state of the music industry, citing the fact that there are more music creators now than ever and also that the musical products industry is twice as large as the recorded music industry. Innaresting guy, this Mr. Ljung.