Apple Signs EMI, Cloud Music Deals Almost Done

[marksman]

Look everyone a living example of an Apple Fanboy.

I think google and Amazon know that the RIAA can not really touch them on how they are currently doing it. Space is cheaper then more than likely what RIAA was demanding in fees. RIAA business model is very out dated and they are still struggling to stay relevant in today's internet world.

Google and Amazon are like to suffer consequences because of their rush to get out ahead of Apple. Apple took their time and did it their way, and it will likely work out well for them.

This is why when people blab about competition and Apple it is funny. Apple does their own thing and proceeds as planned. They did not rush things because of Google and Amazon jumping the gun... I suspect this will be to their benefit in the long time.

In fact it is likely Amazon and Google played right into Apple's hands. The record labels have wanted to remove Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market for a while. By jumping the gun, though, Amazon and Google have pretty much tied the hands of the record labels and given Apple a huge advantage.

It is likely that Apple took advantage of the opportunity on this to come up with some exclusive parts of the puzzle at least in the short term, which will cause Amazon and Google to fall a bit behind.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

Someone please explain how this is going to work with data caps? i Have 2gb's which would render this service useless.

 

[ChazUK]

Someone please explain how this is going to work with data caps? i Have 2gb's which would render this service useless.

Cloud access to music is great to use when Wifi is available and you're on a restricted plan.

A couple of weeks ago we were out around a friend's house talking about music and my wife was talking about some specific tracks. She connected to their Wifi network, plugged her iPhone into their iPod dock and started accessing her music over the internet (via Audiogalaxy).

Such a service is great for situations like that.

 

[bushido]

Cloud access to music is great to use when Wifi is available and you're on a restricted plan.

A couple of weeks ago we were out around a friend's house talking about music and my wife was talking about some specific tracks. She connected to their Wifi network, plugged her iPhone into their iPod dock and started accessing her music over the internet (via Audiogalaxy).

Such a service is great for situations like that.

wow ur wife sounds amazing, i'd expect most not even knowing what wifi means xD

 

[OllyW]

Cloud access to music is great to use when Wifi is available and you're on a restricted plan.

A couple of weeks ago we were out around a friend's house talking about music and my wife was talking about some specific tracks. She connected to their Wifi network, plugged her iPhone into their iPod dock and started accessing her music over the internet (via Audiogalaxy).

Such a service is great for situations like that.

That's how I see it panning out, great for occasional use when you're away from your music collection.

I'll stick with my iPod classic for day to day use.

 

[Nuvi]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Just waiting for the "only iTunes purchased music" hammer to fall. When / if it does, this will be slightly more popular than Ping is currently.

I truly hope this is not the case. But if so I agree with Ping metaphor. In all honesty a paid service needs to allow the customer to stream every single song they own regardless where they bought it from. If its free (which I highly doubt) then its understandable that only iTunes music is allowed. However, to get the best of the both worlds it would be great to see MobileMe (aka paid service) "stream everything" and free "stream your iTunes bought music" solutions.

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

Whats the point?

Everyone else is rolling ahead without the labels.

The labels are giving better deals to other digital distributors.

What exactly does Apple get by playing by the labels rules?

 

[MrWinters]

That would be okay, more market share for Apple means my stock goes up!

Wooo Hooo!!!! I can't wait to use this service!!! It may or may not be as good as Google's or Amazon's, but Big Duke Six's stock will go up!!!!

I'm in!!!

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

I really don't understand the point of this service.

Just introduce HomeShare coupled with Back To My Mac and you have users hosting their own "cloud" service.

 

[Nuvi]

I really don't understand the point of this service.

Just introduce HomeShare coupled with Back To My Mac and you have users hosting their own "cloud" service.

The problem with home streaming is the "home streaming". Dedicated servers are far more robust and reliable and in most cases double as high availability/redundancy remote backups.

 

[gnasher729]

Do you really think that a C&D letter will stop the likes of Goolge and Amazon? Seriously? I'd bet that Google and Amazon has enough lawyers to tell them what they are doing is legal, and if sued, they can tie up the RIAA for YEARS in the court system in expensive litigation that they can easily absorb financially.

They can _not_ absorb possible damages. The maximum possible fine is $150,000 per song. With maybe three million different songs on their servers, that could be $450 billion. The exact amount would be "all the money they have".

 

[8CoreWhore]

I'm with a lot of people here - I don't know what it is or what they will do with it, but I don't like it!

 

[chaosbunny]

Yeah, this is so cool, now the music industry can have precise statistics who listens to what how often, so they can make their commercial music based on this to make more mediocre music that is easy to listen to for the majority of the people.

And think of the possibilities. The government will be able to track who is a pontential threat because he listens to aggressive music.

Let's all upload our stuff to the cloud so that corporations can have tracks of everything we have on our computers. This is obviously good, because by selling our information to the highest bidder they can make even more money, obviously only to make better stuff for us.

 

[8CoreWhore]

So, lets say the record companies demand Google and Amazon have the same terms as they just gave Apple - and the key term is, they can only upload music that was purchased through them - that would be a huge advantage for Apple and a catastrophe to Google and Amazon.

Most people have songs from iTunes and not from the other two... so, if a person has a bunch of songs from iTunes, but none from Google, which cloud streaming service will that customer use? Apple... and people don't want their library split between services...

Apple is years ahead of the competition.

 

[OllyW]

And think of the possibilities. The government will be able to track who is a pontential threat because he listens to aggressive music.

Do you want to buy this nice shiny silver hat?

 

[wackymacky]

I find it difficult to see the marketing model of this. Presuming that I have already paid a dollar, or what ever per song I own in my iTunes library (assuming it's all legit). Most of this already will fit on a 16gb iPhone/iPad/iPod.

For the rest, I might only play them once or twice a year. I'm sure not going to want to pay enough of a fee to have access to them on a whim, that would make it worth the record companys effort to try and licence the whole process.

(the only way would be if the iPhone 5 had only 1 or 2 gb of storage to force me in to it, and that wouldn't fly)

 

[Nuvi]

So, lets say the record companies demand Google and Amazon have the same terms as they just gave Apple - and the key term is, they can only upload music that was purchased through them - that would be a huge advantage for Apple and a catastrophe to Google and Amazon.

Most people have songs from iTunes and not from the other two... so, if a person has a bunch of songs from iTunes, but none from Google, which cloud streaming service will that customer use? Apple... and people don't want their library split between services...

Apple is years ahead of the competition.

Amazon has had their Cloud Player and Cloud Storage (or what ever its called) online and running for many months now. Recording industry hasn't done anything to try to block this. Amazon allows free storage of music bought from Amazon and 20GB of free space for songs purchased from third parties. In what way Apple is "years ahead of competition" when they even don't have a service up and running?

 

[chaosbunny]

Do you want to buy this nice shiny silver hat?

View attachment 285971

Funny how people without any arguments against legit criticism keep posting this old joke thinking they are witty.

Do you want to buy an usb or wifi implant for your ass so you can upload your data faster to the internet?

 

[BlackMangoTree]

Cloud access to music is great to use when Wifi is available and you're on a restricted plan.

A couple of weeks ago we were out around a friend's house talking about music and my wife was talking about some specific tracks. She connected to their Wifi network, plugged her iPhone into their iPod dock and started accessing her music over the internet (via Audiogalaxy).

Such a service is great for situations like that.

Great for people with unlimited or very large caps here even adsl plans come with small caps. I just can't see how this is going to work with very limited bandwidth here.

 

[OllyW]

Funny how people without any arguments against legit criticism keep posting this old joke thinking they are witty.

Do you want to buy an usb or wifi implant for your ass so you can upload your data faster to the internet?

Do you seriously think the Government is going to monitor what songs you listen to or was that your idea of a joke?

 

[MonkeySee....]

Here is why google just won't compete with apple...

Google release "Music beta". Who, what? What is this i'm sure i read about it someone on the interweb.

Apple release "iCloud". Marketing on overdrive. Even tribes in Africa know about it. You won't stop hearing about this.

 

[OllyW]

Great for people with unlimited or very large caps here even adsl plans come with small caps. I just can't see how this is going to work with very limited bandwidth here.

Like in ChasUK's example, it's ok for occasional use but impractical for everyday listening.

 

[rdlink]

Why do I have this feeling that once Apple has signed and closed these deals, Amazon and Google will be stung with a cease & desist from the RIAA for their cloud music efforts, leaving just Apple as the only place to go for cloud music.

Sorry, I see it differently. I see Google and Amazon signing similar deals to Apple's shortly thereafter.

My theory is that the music industry scumbags used Google's and Amazon's desire to be first as leverage against them in negotiations, and tried to set the market price high. Google and Android knew that Apple, with their market position would be able to get a deal that the RIAA slimeballs would not give them, and walked away from the table.

Mark my word. Google and Amazon will be offering the same services as Apple by Labor day. Of course, theirs will likely be klugey and have an ugly interface comparative to Apple's. But what's new about that?

 

[Popeye206]

Never said it was going to happen, just saying what I think the outcome would be IF it were to happen that way. I would elated if this deal was source agnostic, however, I think there is a distinct possibility that it will be for iTunes only acquired content.

I thought I remember reading somewhere the rumor was iTunes and Matched music (i.e. music from your collection that was in the iTunes library) would be accessed from a universal library and unique music, or music it can't match to the library would be in your account? I guess we'll know in a couple weeks. Looks like this, Lion and hopefully iOS 5 will be the big things at the developers conference.

Oh... personally... i hate the term "Cloud"... I think the Microsoft "off to the cloud" commercial killed it for me. They make it seem so cheesy!

 

[Popeye206]

Sorry, I see it differently. I see Google and Amazon signing similar deals to Apple's shortly thereafter.

My theory is that the music industry scumbags used Google's and Amazon's desire to be first as leverage against them in negotiations, and tried to set the market price high. Google and Android knew that Apple, with their market position would be able to get a deal that the RIAA slimeballs would not give them, and walked away from the table.

Mark my word. Google and Amazon will be offering the same services as Apple by Labor day. Of course, theirs will likely be klugey and have an ugly interface comparative to Apple's. But what's new about that?

Why are the music industry people "scumbags"??? Because they want to make money?