What if you don't already "own" the music ?
Do you expect Apple to determine what specific song is pirated ? And if you do please explain how they could do that.
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Apple Determines iTunes Match Royalties By Counting How Many Times A Song is Accessed
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What if you don't already "own" the music ?
Do you expect Apple to determine what specific song is pirated ? And if you do please explain how they could do that.
Considering that unauthorised digital media distribution (I refuse to call it piracy or theft as there is no actual loss) is here to stay, will only increase in frequency, and CANNOT be prevented (no matter how much obtrusive DRM is embedded) it's good to see pressure being placed on the music (and later hopefully film) industries to change their outdated, failing and greedy business models.
I have no doubt that they will have to move to a low expenditure, free-to-distribute, donate-if-you-like-it model, possibly with government subsidies in the future. How else can film/music industries continue to profit from selling things that can be easily be created, from nothing, by anybody?
I have no doubt that they will have to move to a low expenditure, free-to-distribute, donate-if-you-like-it model, possibly with government subsidies in the future. How else can film/music industries continue to profit from selling things that can be easily be created, from nothing, by anybody?
This is one of those rare instances in the music industry where EVERYONE wins:
1) The consumer gets a full backup of all of their music, a quality upgrade of the library, complete access to their full library at any time, and possibly legitimate copies of pirated music, all for ONLY $25 year (a great deal). Plus, this is a CHOICE - they are no worse off than they had been if they choose not to.
2) The music industry and artist make money not only on the initial sale, but also now on previously pirated music and more money on each iTunes Match play for both. Money they would have never gotten otherwise.
3) Apple gets good PR, at least enough money to cover there costs of running this (I assume), or if not, increased sales for devices that use iTuns Match assuming it's a selling point
Now, if only the iTunes Match service itself worked 100% correctly......
Tony
1) The consumer gets a full backup of all of their music, a quality upgrade of the library, complete access to their full library at any time, and possibly legitimate copies of pirated music, all for ONLY $25 year (a great deal). Plus, this is a CHOICE - they are no worse off than they had been if they choose not to.
2) The music industry and artist make money not only on the initial sale, but also now on previously pirated music and more money on each iTunes Match play for both. Money they would have never gotten otherwise.
3) Apple gets good PR, at least enough money to cover there costs of running this (I assume), or if not, increased sales for devices that use iTuns Match assuming it's a selling point
Now, if only the iTunes Match service itself worked 100% correctly......
Tony
It's only big labels that stand to make money from anything involving recorded music. Very few indie labels are profitable, even fewer indie artists are.
As an independent artist, and the owner of a small record label, I am happy with iTunes Match. Will I make a lot of money from it? No, but I don't make a lot of money from selling music anyway. At least its an additional revenue stream that doesn't mean fans have to spend a lot of money. $25/yr for this service is quite reasonable.
You can access songs from your ENTIRE music library on devices that have less capacity than the size of your library, or even easily get them on another computer you own. Secondly, you have a complete backup of your entire library, including all metadata, in case your original gets wiped out in some manner. Lastly, if you have songs in your library that are lower than 128 kbps (such as songs downloaded several years ago from iTunes), you get an upgrade in quality to 256 kbps.
A good deal for $25, assuming the bugs get worked out.
Tony
Well, I pay roughly 10$/month to back up my music and pictures online. I can now downgrade (i'm being lazy) and remove my music from that backup and pay 25$ for Apple's online back-up.
That's 2.08$ per month to back-up my music!
We're not paying twice for a song, we're paying for a serves that lets us upgrade our lower quality songs and have access to our library on any computer, iPad or iPhone. I could care less about where that $25 goes to Apple, music artiest or label. Even if we are paying twice that 2nd payment will be MUCH less than a penny. Apple made a smart plan with this and everyone seems happy about it, a rarity for music labels.
As I understand it, they use some kind of "fingerprinting" technology to identify the song. Think of a cryptographic digest like MD5 or SHA-1, but designed for audio. They generate a fingerprint for every track you didn't purchase from the iTunes store. Then they upload the list of fingerprints to an Apple server, which compares them against tracks in Apple's servers.
If a song's fingerprint matches a song on Apple's server, then the file on the Apple server is available to download to other devices. If no match is found, then your file is uploaded (with high bit-rate files being transcoded to 256K AAC), allowing your devices to download the song itself.
Conceptually, this isn't anything novel. In practice, it's a big deal. An algorithm to accurately fingerprint songs that is also fuzzy enough to deal with rips from different CDs and songs digitized from vinyl and cassette (which often works, but not as reliably as rips from CD) isn't easy to develop, and requires a level of CPU power that wasn't easily available a few years ago.
I wonder what algorithm they actually are using. I suppose a trivial method might be to just transcode the song down to something extremely small, like a 1Kbps representation. At that bit rate, a song is about 7.5K bytes per minute of music. This would be easy to upload and compare against a database of similarly-transcoded files. The result would sound terrible, but it would still contain more than enough data to clearly recognize and identify the song.
Good question. You're not paying to hear your music. You're paying to serve it to your portable devices via Apple's servers. $25 sounds like a good deal for this kind of service, even if nothing went to the record labels.
IMO, this is a win-win situation. You get a fairly cheap hosting/streaming solution for your music, and the record labels get extra revenue that they wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
Radio isn't free. You, the listener, don't pay, but the radio stations pay the labels for broadcast rights.
True. And if this is what you want to do (it's what I want to do), there's nobody stopping you.
If, on the other hand, you've got a lot of music, and it won't all fit on your portable devices, then this kind of service is valuable.
For example, I've got about 10,000 songs consuming 50GB on my hard drive. I have them all synced to an iPod classic with no problem, but they wouldn't come close to fitting on an iPhone or an iPad (unless I get the most expensive model and want to use nearly all of its capacity for music.)
Today, I use a system of smart playlists to sync a 3.5GB subset of music to smaller devices, like my 4GB iPod nano. With iTunes Match, an internet-connected device like an iPhone will see my entire collection, downloading tracks on an as-needed basis, allowing me the luxury of choosing what I want to hear when I'm away from my Mac.
Is that ability worth $25/yr? For some, it definitely is. Not for others.
No, that's not how it works. It's 12% to the songWRITERS. The actually PERFORMING artists get paid out of the record company's 88%.
Seriously? Really? Ok- you gots a billion songs on your computer you ripped from all your CDs or your friend CDs or bought from iTunes. Apple reads what songs you have. If they sell that song, they give you access to stream/download it to all your devices from their server in the cloud. If they don't sell that song, they upload your copy to the cloud so you can stream it to all your devices. They charge you $25 a year for this service. It does not infringe on the space alloyed to you for your iCloud services like mail.
Indeed, mine is bordering 500GB. Can't upload that to any portable device, not even my laptop.
how is that not theft? there is no actual loss? how is it different if you worked as lawyer and didn't get paid for your work?
It may be different than that. Because it can mistakenly match 2 songs, which differ by only some lyrics in them. Like explicit version vs non explicit version.
So it seems to me that the algorithm is comparing random excerpts from the song to the database ones which first match some basic criteria like length, volume etc. So if it finds some random excerpts to be the same, it thinks they are the same song.
When only 10% of the revenue goes to the songwriters, something is wrong. Isn't it better to be independent musician and screw on all those record labels??
A record label isn't just the CEO. There are tons of people working on a song from the record label, recording, mixing, mastering etc. So obviously the record label deserves much more than the artist because the label's fee is being divided among many people, while the artists fee goes to one person, or couple of people in a band.
So stupid. So if you download a free copy of a book you would normally have to buy in the store, it is not theft? If you download a free copy of software you would normally have to purchase, it is not theft?
I've attempted such a model with one of my apps. It has had thousands of downloads and has made me about $10 in the past half a year. It costs $100/year to simply put things on the app store. This model DOES NOT work.
The US Government is $14 trillion in debt. Various EU Governments are going bankrupt. Never mind why they would pay, I'd like to hear how they'd get the money in the first place.
B******T! You have clearly never created a professional song, movie, book, or app (forgive me if I've left out other forms of media.) It takes years of honing skills and months of work to put these works together. While it's true that anybody theoretically has the potential to put them together, not just anybody will. Please, go back and continue occupying wall street or whatever city you'd like. Please learn how mistaken you are and grow quickly so that you can be a productive member of society soon (the world has a shortage of them.)