30% of iPhone Users Leaning Toward Using iTunes Match

[BC2009]

With iTunes match, do you actually get the replacement song files downloaded to your computer, or do you just get the matches "in the cloud?"

In other words, could I subscribe to iTunes match for one year and get all of my ripped songs from iTunes and then drop it a year later and continue to have my songs matched in the cloud since I now have "official" iTunes files on my computer?

I *believe* that Apple is going to give you the actual file to store locally. However, whereas a normal iTunes purchase would be available via iCloud sync to all devices, the iTunes-matched music that you never actually purchased through iTunes would only be available if you have your current $25 per year subscription. Apple does have a record of every song you actually purchased from them through iTunes.

So the scenario would go like this....

1) Rip 100 CDs

2) Get iTunes Match and get iTunes digital files for everything ripped

3) Use iCloud to effortlessly move music between your devices whether bought on iTunes or matched by iTunes

4) iTunes Match subscription expires

5) All your iTunes Match music that has not been purchased can no longer be synced over iCloud, but you still have all the digital files so that you can sync them manually

Your alternative is to buy the music directly on iTunes to avoid the recurring fees. Basically, Apple is selling you the synching service and giving the music industry a cut. The music industry likes it because it creates a recurring revenue model for them on music they previously got nothing for, and if you don't like the recurring revenue, but like the iCloud service then maybe you will repurchase (or first-time purchase) the music that you ripped.

I imagine many folks actually purchased CDs as opposed to downloading bootlegged copies. But iTunes Match will treat those the same way.

 

[gnasher729]

So if you buy all of your music from iTunes, this service is pretty much superfluous, right?

Yes. Apple offers a service; that service is free for all music that you bought from the iTunes store, it costs $25 a year for all music that is on your computer that Apple manages to match with a song on the iTunes store (up to 25,000 songs), plus up to 5 GB of songs that Apple cannot match up.

But wouldn't you be able to match your crappy bitrate mp3, download the 256 aac to your idevice, and then use idump or any of the thousand other "ipod to computer" transfer programs to put that 256 onto your harddrive (essentially replacing your old file with the new offical iTS track)?

Your Macintosh is just a device. No need to download to your iPod first. You can download the 256 KBit songs directly to your Mac.

 

[ericinboston]

What does it mean for a survey to offer 3 options and interpret 2 of them as "likely"?

"Bias" is the word here I guess

Exactly. 10% are definite and an additional 20% are a "somewhat" (aka maybe)...best to be conservative and say 20% TOTAL rather than 30% since part of a "somewhat" is a "no thanks".


Even at best, 30% is a pretty bad report card.

I think the Match feature is somewhat attractive...but there are a lot of questions regarding later on down the road if you actually own and/or can download the "matched" song and other questions. I'd also gather that unless you've been collecting mp3s since 1996, a very very high percentage of your mp3s are at 192k or higher. Not sure how much better quality you're going to get going from 192k to 256k or even 320k. Nice to have, yes...but never noticeable with earbuds/headphones or listening in a car or playing on your boombox or outputting the headphone jack to your stereo. If it was 100% quality (WAV or non-Apple-proprietary-lossless), I would be all ears. No pun intended.

 

[NoNothing]

Worth $25/year to not always re-sync.

I have 500-600 ripped CDs available on all my devices. It is called syncing. Rotate and reuse.

$25/month? Not a chance. $100/year? Not a chance. $25/year? Heck yea.

 

[Razeus]

I guess I'm not seeing how anyone would want this. I can understand if a song pops up into my head and know I don't have it on my device and I want to listen to it, sure. But I can't imagine people downloading gigs of music constantly just to listen to stuff. Pandora fills that niche. I guess I need to see what they'll do with my playlists. For example, if I didn't sync my "80's Music" or "70's Soul" playlist and felt mood for the music at any given time, this is a real benefit. Just downloading random music a song at a time is not much of a benefit except for the rare occasions.

 

[LastLine]

Image

DRM free.

Yep fair play Roll on UK roll out.

 

[BJMRamage]

I *believe* that Apple is going to give you the actual file to store locally. However, whereas a normal iTunes purchase would be available via iCloud sync to all devices, the iTunes-matched music that you never actually purchased through iTunes would only be available if you have your current $25 per year subscription. Apple does have a record of every song you actually purchased from them through iTunes.

I'm afraid of this. I just downloaded a FREE DMB Caravan Sampler and was waiting for it to show on my iPhone so i didn't have to sync. I am guessing since it was FREE it will not honor that free sync. That stinks but that makes sense for Apple to not just have people do this once and then have the ability to have all the songs "in the cloud" for free for years.

Also of note to people saying it will use their 3G data...go to a Starbucks/McDonald/DD/any place that has free WiFi and use that to download the songs "free" of charges.

 

[garty]

I think you have a little confusion too. 24.99 doesn't mean your entire itunes library is in the iCloud. Granted - many people have less than say, 25,000 songs. But if you have a HUGE collection of music - you'll exceed the 5gig allowance (remember that itunes purchased music does not go towards that 5 gig allotment). That being said - 24.99 has little to nothing to do with actual storage. Two different things altogether.

iCloud - 5 gigs (plus syncing of photos, contacts, purchased music, etc) is free
24.99 is for the MATCH service only.

Only files that iTunes can't match and therefore are uploaded will count against your 5 gb limit

 

[nibus]

It'll be interesting to see how this service handles live performances. I can see iTunes Match confusing "Evenflow - Pearl Jam - Live in Tokyo, 1998" with "Evenflow - Pearl Jam - Ten". It remains to be seen how much control/input the end user will have in this process. Will we be able to say, "that match is wrong, please upload this version"?

This is what will make it or break it for me. I wish we had more details on the song matching process, ie how close the lengths and qualities have to be for the song to be a match. I would imagine Live content would rely heavily on metadata as well as waveform recognition. Hopefully we will have the option to cancel a match or force re-recognize certain songs.

I will use it under one condition: that my edited tags are included. I spend time making sure music added to my library has the correct date, etc. I hate buying an artists collection from a decade gone by with the date on all the songs being the original CD release of last year for instance. I also add group identifiers and/or comments for smart lists. Holiday music may be jazz but be in the "Yule" group.

I'll hate it if I download to another device from icloud and find that all my work is replaced.

I highly doubt it will extract metadata from your collection and replace the iTunes counterpart. However, I'm sure there are utilities out there that would do this.

 

[Obi-Wan Kubrick]

If one were to only sync 4 or 5 star rated songs to their iOS device then you would be able to push the iTunes purchased songs through iCloud and save $25 a year.

 

[HE15MAN]

Does this give you physical download copies of iTunes versions of your library, or do they give you cloud versions and you never get an actual copy?

 

[firewater101]

From a cabin in the woods...

I'm usually not a tinfoil hat kinda guy, but won't iTunes match give Apple some major leverage when it comes to identifying pirated music? It seems to me that by comparing the MD5 hashes of all files given to Match that it will be easy for Apple to identify exactly who has downloaded how many copies of which songs, which are then tied directly to your iTunes account forever. Is it that much of a stretch to think Apple may one day turn this data over to the RIAA? I haven't read the EULA or anything, but am I far out there in recommending people point match at their downloaded files at their own risk? The media seems to think this is amnesty for pirates, but it's not like Apple has specifically said that this service's purpose is to legitimize pirated files. Now, I know that even if that was an intended purpose, they wouldn't actually come out and say that. However, the service is marketed as an efficiency thing for your personally ripped tracks for which you legally own the CD, so that you don't have to upload them and use space. What do you think, am I just paranoid? Not that I would EVER download music illegally, I just know some people

 

[firewater101]

My thinking is we haven't seen everything with iTunes Match/iCloud yet. It doesn't make sense for it to not be a streaming service. I think the final incarnation of it will be similar to iTunes home sharing in the interface. You will be able to see and play your iCloud Library on any connected device, and choose to import whatever you like from it.

I think people get too hung up on "streaming". After all, what's the difference between songs sync'ing to your device over the air and streaming? To me the only difference is that you don't have to download it again if you want to play it again. If you have sufficient local storage, this is better than streaming because once it sync's, you can have it offline. I would imagine that if you stop paying for Match, then those songs will just no longer be available to sync from iCloud (where it doesn't count against your storage limit), it wont delete your already downloaded files. The difference between a Match track and one actually purchased from iTunes is that the one from iTunes will be available to sync from iCloud forever.

 

[tonjik]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; cs-cz) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8J2)

its usa only right?

For now, but I can't see this not happening in other countries in time. Its all about how the music companies view this and you know how anal retentive they can be.

So then the extrapolation in the study does not make sense.

There are many countries where iOS devices are sold, but you cannot buy any song via iTunes, which sucks (Apple does not have contracts with labels worldwide).

 

[nibus]

I'm usually not a tinfoil hat kinda guy, but won't iTunes match give Apple some major leverage when it comes to identifying pirated music? It seems to me that by comparing the MD5 hashes of all files given to Match that it will be easy for Apple to identify exactly who has downloaded how many copies of which songs, which are then tied directly to your iTunes account forever. Is it that much of a stretch to think Apple may one day turn this data over to the RIAA? I haven't read the EULA or anything, but am I far out there in recommending people point match at their downloaded files at their own risk? The media seems to think this is amnesty for pirates, but it's not like Apple has specifically said that this service's purpose is to legitimize pirated files. Now, I know that even if that was an intended purpose, they wouldn't actually come out and say that. However, the service is marketed as an efficiency thing for your personally ripped tracks for which you legally own the CD, so that you don't have to upload them and use space. What do you think, am I just paranoid? Not that I would EVER download music illegally, I just know some people

The only files they could consistently recognize would be scene releases that hadn't been tampered with in any way - for example, if you edited the tags in anyway, changed album art, padded 0's for track numbers etc the hash would be completely different. And just because someone obtains a file through p2p doesn't mean it's illegal for them to keep it, providing that they already own the file on CD.

 

[seamer]

When did Match move from unlimited to 25,000 track limit? The track limit was mentioned as a poke at Google for implementing that limit themselves just days earlier.

 

[IMPOSSIBLEMAN]

10 - 20 % is what i anticipate

 

[Carouser]

In other words, could I subscribe to iTunes match for one year and get all of my ripped songs from iTunes and then drop it a year later and continue to have my songs matched in the cloud since I now have "official" iTunes files on my computer?

No. You didn't buy those ripped songs from iTunes, they are not 'iTunes-purchased' songs and thus if you cease your Match subscription then they will not be in iCloud for you. Only iTunes-purchased songs are free through iCloud.

I know it has been answered, but the same question comes up a lot.

I'm not fully aware of how it works exactly, but I think there are two possible ways; you pay $25 dollars and all your ripped songs are now iTunes songs. You can download them on any iOS device, delete them, and download them again and again. And these songs are like this forever. If you get more ripped songs the next year, you have to pay again to get them as iTunes songs.

What? No. All your ripped songs are in iCloud available to you for as long as you pay for iTunes Match. When you stop paying for Match, you can't get your ripped songs through iCloud. That's exactly what you are paying the $25 for!

The second way would be that you have to keep paying $25 dollars a year to keep your ripped songs as iTunes songs. If you don't pay and you delete them from your iOS device and don't have a PC anymore, then they are just gone and you can't redownload them.

Yes. This is how it works. There is no ambiguity about this.

If this were the 1970s, iTunes Match would be like paying a butler $25 a year to bring you the records you own, wherever you are. If you stop paying for the butler, you can't get your records delivered to you. Similarly, if you destroy your records or never owned the songs to begin with, paying a butler to deliver things won't magically bring records you don't own to you.

***

I don't see why iCloud and iTunes Match causes so much confusion. iCloud is basically a giant database of the iTunes music you bought. If you paid for a song from iTunes, you can get it from any WiFi network onto any of your Apple devices indefinitely. iTunes Match does the same thing at $25/year for music you haven't bought from iTunes.

People are actively making this more complicated than it is.

 

[FroMann]

I still prefer to just sync my music through iTunes, I'll take my fresh 320Kbps MP3s from CD rips over AAC anyway.

 

[SandynJosh]

I think its a little bit too early for anyone to make a definitive decision as to whether or not they will sign up for the iTunes Match service.

The $24.99/year service does look appealing to me, but the details surrounding the terms of service are still very scarce. I think a lot of the people who voted "Unlikely" either don't know much about iTunes Match or want to wait to see the details.

I'm totally with you on this. I think I know a lot more about iTunes Match than people that didn't see the whole WWDC announcement, and read the follow up threads on this board...but if I hadn't done all that, I'd have voted "unlikely" as well.

Once Apple starts advertising what iTunes Match is, and what it will cost, and how it will benefit the subscriber...THEN a survey will make a lot more sense.

About the only take-away I got from this survey is that 10% of those surveyed said, "Apple, yeah, whatever, I'm for it."

Another 20% said, "Apple? Must be kool, I might do it. lol!!!!! <3"

The final 70% fell into the "Whatcha talkin' 'bout, boy?? Git off my porch!"

 

[AaronEdwards]

Exactly. 10% are definite and an additional 20% are a "somewhat" (aka maybe)...best to be conservative and say 20% TOTAL rather than 30% since part of a "somewhat" is a "no thanks".


Even at best, 30% is a pretty bad report card.

The size of the sample asked is just 450, so an interval for "likely" that would contain the true value in the entire population 95% of the time would be 10 +/- 2.77 and for "somewhat likely" it would be 20 +/- 3.7.

(And this is if the people asked where randomly selected.)

Also, not only the use of "somewhat" is troublesome, but also "likely".
They should have used better words and asked more iPhone users.

 

[AaronEdwards]

The only files they could consistently recognize would be scene releases that hadn't been tampered with in any way - for example, if you edited the tags in anyway, changed album art, padded 0's for track numbers etc the hash would be completely different. And just because someone obtains a file through p2p doesn't mean it's illegal for them to keep it, providing that they already own the file on CD.

1. They only need to ignore the tags when creating the checksums, and what you suggest would be in vain. Furthermore, they can also just make a checksum of part of the file, which means that you would have to edit a lot more than just the tags. And most won't, they will not even change the tags. But this won't be a problem unless you have illegal files.

2. I'm pretty certain that just because you own the CD, you are still not allowed to download a copy of it. But since you argue it, any law or ruling that would support that it's ok?

We have yet to hear anything from Apple about iTunes Match that would address illegally obtained files. I doubt that the speculation will be true, since I doubt that the four giant record companies would make such deal.

 

[blybug]

No. You didn't buy those ripped songs from iTunes, they are not 'iTunes-purchased' songs and thus if you cease your Match subscription then they will not be in iCloud for you. Only iTunes-purchased songs are free through iCloud.

I don't see why iCloud and iTunes Match causes so much confusion. iCloud is basically a giant database of the iTunes music you bought. If you paid for a song from iTunes, you can get it from any WiFi network onto any of your Apple devices indefinitely. iTunes Match does the same thing at $25/year for music you haven't bought from iTunes.

People are actively making this more complicated than it is.

Because they think they are going to "own" all these iTunes Plus 256kbps AAC files the same as if they paid $1.29 for each of them individually. The listening experience will be very similar and virtually indistinguishable as long as you are "on network" and continue to pay the annual fee. I was the lone voice of reason on this thread last week trying to explain this against a swarm of people who think they're going to download a bunch of music for keeps.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1171764/

 

[blybug]

Image

DRM free.

Still find it interesting that while the slide says "DRM-free," Jobs never said those words in the keynote and they do not appear anywhere on Apple's current webpage describing iTunes Match. Just that the matched tracks "play back" and you can "listen" at full quality 256kbps.

The 18 million songs Apple is making playable from the cloud are indeed "DRM-free" but that does not mean you get to keep them.

 

[m828s]

By saying this, I don't think you understand what iMatch is for. It's not streaming. If you have an iOS device and purchase a song on iTunes, then delete it (which you can do iOS 5) and can then go to the Purchased tab, see that song listed there and redownload it. Or if you have two iOS device and buy a song on one, you can go to the Purchased tab on the other device, see it there and download it. This feature is already available, though you can't delete from the device itself. But you can get a feel for how it will work.

What iMatch does is take all your ripped songs and give them this same functionality. Treating the ripped songs as though you had bought them from iTunes and allowing you to download and delete from iOS devices (and PCs) as often as you like.

Mostly, this is for people that don't want a PC anymore and need to have their ripped songs treated as iTunes songs, so they can have this functionality.

Your assumption would be incorrect. I have 80 gigs worth of music and a data plan which provides me a tiny fraction of that per month. If I choose to listen over a cellular network (e.g., at work), I'll burn through that 200MB in a hurry. I enjoy lots of variety, and will often shuffle my songs and listen randomly until I happen upon an album I'm in the mood for, and then I'll choose to listen to the album. That's a heckuva lot of data transfer in a short amount of time. Easily 60 MBs an hour... assuming no song repeats.

Distinction between streaming and downloading is meaningless to someone like me who will have long periods of his day away from wifi. Sure, I could spend time each night re-downloading a new set of songs into my iPhone, but you sure do lose some spontaneity there. What if I want to listen to the latest Bon Iver or Arcade Fire or Kanye albums? If I'm lucky, I might have a song or two from the album downloaded from the night before. But at work, I'd have to stream/download over 3Gs, and with 200 MB a month that just isn't going to work.