On-demand streaming music services like Spotify, Napster and Apple Music are the de facto standard these days but that wasn't always the case. In the early days of streaming, consumers felt apprehensive about abandoning their MP3 collections... and rightfully so.
Most streaming providers offer a respectable library of tracks but odds are, no one service has every single track you'd ever want. To help bridge the gap, many services in their earlier days offered to let users upload MP3s to the cloud from their personal collection so they could be streamed or downloaded at any time.
Now that streaming has taken root, some providers are transitioning away from online storage lockers.
Amazon this week revealed that its Amazon Music Storage subscription plans - both free and paid versions - are being retired.
On the Amazon Music Storage help page, the e-commerce giant notes that the ability to upload music was removed from the Amazon Music app for PC and Mac on December 18. Tracks that had previously been uploaded can be played and downloaded until January 2019.
It's worth clarifying that these changes only impact music you have imported. Tunes purchased from Amazon or acquired through AutoRip will continue to be available for playback and download. AutoRip debuted in early 2013 as a way to give customers free digital versions of physical CDs they'd purchased from the online retailer.
Your best bet at this point would be to go ahead and download tracks you have stored with Amazon ASAP. Sure, you technically still have a little over a year to do so but plans could change between now and then (or more likely, you'll simply forget to do it and miss the deadline).