Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

I came upon this article on Ars Technica this morning:

Why iTunes Match Has Indie Soul Label Singing The Blues

For those that don’t have their eyes glued to Apple fanboy RSS feeds and watch liveblogs of the developer’s conference keynotes, let me explain.  Apple is taking an evolutionary step into the cloud, a magical place with some magical abilities.  With the new iCloud platform, all of your iOS, Mac and Windows 7 desktops will play nicely, synchronizing all of your documents and music on servers away from your homes and offices.  What does this mean for you?  It means that every time you work on a document, play a song or download an app on your iPhone, iPad or laptop, that file will be available on the rest of your devices almost instantly and without any interaction on your part.

As an infamous “one more thing” during the Apple keynote, Jobs introduced a new service called iTunes Match.  iTunes Match helps with this synchronization effort and reduces storage space in the cloud by scanning your iTunes library.  Any songs you have listed in the library that are available via the iTunes Store will be linked in the cloud to the version at the store.  By doing this Apple doesn’t have to store all of your music on their servers.  They can just point to their copy and give you permission to listen to it.  As part of this, they have included what feels to many like an amnesty program for music pirates.  For a low annual fee of $25 a year you will be able to have your non-iTunes purchased music available in the cloud as well.  Dropping all pretense, if you’ve pirated everything you’ve ever listened to and never bought a single piece of music, your collection (or the songs in the iTunes Store from your library) is free and clear in the iTunes cloud, all for a low, low fee.  If they don’t have a copy in the iTunes Store you can upload it into your personal cloud and have it available to all devices just like the iTunes Match items.

For someone like myself, this is great news.  While my music piracy days are long, long past, I still have several gigabytes of music on my hard drive that came from an intensive home project.  I ripped over 200 CDs I owned into iTunes, then stored them in a DJ box now stashed in my garage.  Having those available to all of my devices is essential to the success of Apple’s cloud initiative, at least to me.

As much as I can sympathize with the owner of this label, people need to move past the notion of physical media and copyrights.  It seems he would prefer making nothing vs. making a pittance on the principal that people shouldn’t pirate music.  People pirated music long before iTunes and long since and will continue to do so until the model eventually becomes ad-based free music everywhere (shudder).  While it is unfortunate that piracy lives, Apple may be the first giant company to offer at the very least a bridge to legitimatize some users in to cleaning up their act.