Info: A&Rs are the music industry’s trend scouts who discover new talent. They’re usually employed by record labels. A&R stands for Artists and Repertoire.

Amazon recently released a free web storage called Cloud Drive. It gives you 5GB of storage to upload your media files online and is based on their Web Services Storage called S3, which is already widely used in cloud computing.

So why do they offer that?Of course they are happy to offer a service where they can charge you if you use more than 5 GB of free storage. But what’s much more interesting is that it now gives them the possibility to analyze not only what music you buy, but also which bands and DJs you and your friends store on that web storage and listen to.

Owning that (meta)data gives them an incredibly interesting signal. They can now analyze trends in local markets and subcultures. That’ll allow them to offer distribution deals to emerging artists that are still underground and no record label has ever heard of. Now that’s a competitive advantage.