Amazon to beat Google and Apple, announce cloud locker for music, movies and books this week?

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As Google and Apple race to deliver their respective cloud music solutions, Amazon is allegedly coming up fast from behind in the hope of beating the two Silicon Valley giants to the digital locker punch. Unnamed sourced told CNET that the online retailer is talking up its upcoming cloud service with Hollywood moguls and music execs. The yet unnamed service is designed to store a wide range of media on Amazon’s servers for backup purposes and on-demand streaming, including items purchased from Amazon and sourced from elsewhere:

Sources from both the film and music industries said Amazon is working on creating a cloud locker service that would enable users to store their existing music, film, and book collections, even content not purchased at Amazon, on the company’s servers.

The story piggy-backs on the publication’s previous report about Google dog-fooding its cloud music service to its employees. Apple’s own cloud locker for music is said to be coming out soon as well. Although Amazon hasn’t obtained all necessary licenses yet, they are to take Apple and Google by surprise with an announcement this week. If true, it’s bound to make a huge splash in the media.

Apple’s offering could be either part of the cloud iTunes initiative or a separate product based on the MobileMe services suite. The talks between Apple and four major labels are stalling, various sources claim, because the two parties couldn’t agree on streaming fees. The labels allegedly want to be paid for every stream, be it an iTunes Store purchase or a track ripped from a CD. Apple will invest $1 billion in a North Carolina datacenter over the course of ten years. The facility is being described as one of the largest datacenters in the world. It’s scheduled to go live soon and is probably designed to handle huge amounts of streaming media.