Apple's Cloud-Based Music Service to Offer Storage, Not Subscription Access

[JanFredrikB]

I've said this for a long time:

• When you buy a song on iTunes, it won't download. It will stay in your cloud.
• From there you can play it on any computer/iOS-device.
• You can also download them onto an iPod that doesn't have WiFi-connection (like Shuffle and Nano).
• And yes, it will be a free service included in the free MobileMe announced next wedensday.

 

[MacMan86]

My iTunes library is almost 500Gb! Thats a lot to backup :-S

No way will this involve uploading your iTunes library to the cloud and there's two very simple reasons why not:

1) Apple servers would be hosting vast amounts of pirated music - neither the labels nor Apple would be ok about this.
2) Between all the users of the service, there would be 100,000 copies of Lady Gaga's latest album on their servers. If you're running a data centre, this level of 'redundancy' would be insanely inefficient.

 

[Amnak]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5)

We'll see soon enough what's going to actually go down. They can't really bite themselves in the foot this would make them sell les of the higher capacity models. Who knows I only buy 16gb iDevices as of now, until next year when my library of apps/music will be too big.

 

[tarkeybear]

What I don't understand...

..is why we need to duplicate all user's (or subscriber's) content up on the cloud?
If I legitimately purchase a song from iTunes, then iTunes and the label should know I have a fair-use license to enjoy that music.

If I lose my music and need to recover it, a simple database search should show that I paid for it once, and allow me to download it again (kind of like the app store model).

If me and a million other users have the latest black eyed peas hit, isn't it more efficient for Apple to keep one copy on file on their servers than a million copies up on a cloud?

I could see a cloud data center being more useful for keeping unique copies of content (home or video or audio files (i.e. youtube)), than keeping multiple copies of the same file?

what am I missing here?

 

[rhett7660]

I am wondering if you plan on using this service your music would be compressed down to the 128 or even less file size. Right now I am using zumocast to do this from my home which I loved (until recently since the service seems to be down). But this is the ideal way for me. I have way to much music almost a terabyte and I want access to it all!

 

[moneyman118]

OSX Server

In Lion the server is free. This must mean that our own home computers are going to be the server for our iTunes media.

 

[ULFoaf]

You can already "stream" MobileMe music to an iPhone

From an iPhone:

Go to iDisk app
find the .mp3 or .mp4 file
click on it; it plays via a Quicktime player

Works over 3g just fine.

 

[dethmaShine]

In Lion the server is free. This must mean that our own home computers are going to be the server for our iTunes media.

From an iPhone:

Go to iDisk app
find the .mp3 or .mp4 file
click on it; it plays via a Quicktime player

Works over 3g just fine.

 

[alent1234]

cool idea for 2007 or 2008 but not today

i have an iphone 3G, 3GS, 4 and a HTC Inspire. a year from now there will be an iphone 6 as well. i'm on the cheapo android phone and my wife is on the iphone and i use old iphones as ipods. that's more and more storage every year at home.

i just reinstalled iOS on my 16GB 3G and it's now only music. my old 3GS is only for apps and i'll probably put some videos on it

as i add more old phones at home i see less and less of a need to use the cloud when i have all this flash storage at home. not like you need anything powerful to play music

 

[Lailoken]

What if your library is say 85gb, like to see that backed up to the cloud!!

Well... Consider this, if they have a program which can validate that you actually own the track on your local machine, using MD5 hashes and rsync tech, then they only need to ever really host one single high quality copy of the file online for each person that owns that same copy. The upload process could be made trivial with the correct technology.

Also if you already purchased the music via iTunes then you should not even need to do this...

 

[darbus69]

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)

To me it sounds pretty simple:

Apple knows everything you've ever bought from iTunes.

Every purchase made in the past, as well as all future purchases will now be able to be accessed from anywhere. Music, Movies, TV shows, etc. Apple will not store your personal library in the cloud, they will just use the original files that are already on their servers. If you've bought that song/movie, you'll get access to it.

For those bitching about their music that wasn't bought on iTunes, Apple could care less. The whole point is to provide incentives to buy everything through iTunes...

my exact thought. why would apple store 10 million versions of any song title, movie etc? just because apple is building a cloud based version of iTunes does not mean they will not also give you the option to stream from
your personal libraries. quit fretting and let it happen-contrary to some MR posters apple does respond to demands of
the market, how in he'll did they get where they are today-by FORCE???...geez!

 

[kevinmmccormick]

If I legitimately purchase a song from iTunes, then iTunes and the label should know I have a fair-use license to enjoy that music
...
what am I missing here?

It seems kind of insignificant to most people, but the license you get when you purchase a digital download is *not* for the music, it is a limited-use license for the specific *copy* that you are purchasing. It is just like buying a CD. If you purchase a CD and scratch it real badly, you (in theory) do not have a license to make a copy of your friend's copy of the same CD.

It is all pointless nitpicking in my opinion, but I am sure that it is defenses like this that Apple is up against when negotiating things for, say, a cloud streaming service or backup service.

This is precisely why MP3.com ended up losing in court with their Zap-It. They just assumed that if you had a copy of a CD then you had the right to access their copy of the same CD. The recording companies basically said to them in court, "this probably would have been fine, but you never checked with us first and paid us for licensing, so we're going to throw the book at you."

 

[rhp2424]

Can anyone see a time that Apple decides that you never have to actually have the data you pay for?

What might happen in the future would be, you purchase data. App, Movie, Music, Book etc, and at the time of purchase the data gets moved from Apple's shopping sever to your own personal remote space.

The data is never transmitted to your device at home.

Your device only needs to access it from the remote location whenever you want to use/see/listen to it.

One day perhaps?

Isn't this the idea behind Google's Chromium OS? Everything, quite literally, is cloud based, isn't it?

 

[JanFredrikB]

Talking about the cloud and MobileMe.

Did anybody see that the dots from the picture from "Yerba Buena Center of arts" (host of the conference next week) also where presented on me.com yesterday?

 

[notabadname]

I'll handle my own storage thank you. Storage is simply so cheap now.

 

[ULFoaf]

No way will this involve uploading your iTunes library to the cloud and there's two very simple reasons why not:

1) Apple servers would be hosting vast amounts of pirated music - neither the labels nor Apple would be ok about this.
2) Between all the users of the service, there would be 100,000 copies of Lady Gaga's latest album on their servers. If you're running a data centre, this level of 'redundancy' would be insanely inefficient.

Right, they just need a record of what you purchased and give you access to it. Stored one place, millions of pointers in user space.

I doubt very much the above person actually purchased about 100,000 songs from iTunes, though there could be a lot of movies...

You can actually backup your pirated music in your own personal MobileMe space, at least 20 GB of it. In fact, you can play it remotely on your iPhone. They might give less to free accounts.

 

[sishaw]

With on-board storage as cheap as it is, I'm not sure I see the point in cloud storage of music, except perhaps as a backup.

 

[ingricky]

Makes sense. Apple's business model is based around people buying and owning music, not renting it.

I always assumed this new facility would support Apple's business, not turn it upside down. This particular rumor goes along with that line of thinking so I'm inclined to believe it.

Also, I long ago decided that Apple knows MobileMe isn't really worth $99, but rather than lowering the price they seemed determined to make it "worth it." This would certainly go a long ways towards that. A streaming rental-music service would bring in more money but a lot of it would go to the music labels. A bunch of new MM subscriptions, on the other hand, would be money that Apple gets to keep.

Perfect analysis. I wouldn't be able to write a better one.

 

[macsrcool1234]

Cloud media is worthless with the current data plans.

 

[gnasher729]

For example, I recently decided to sync my photos with dropbox. My photo library is 20GB and it's been going for a week already with another 5 days predicted to completion.

My iTunes library is 700GB so at that rate it would take well over 6 months to get the thing uploaded!

I would say it is absolutely pointless if you upload a CD that you have ripped onto your Macintosh, and I upload the exact same CD, and ten thousand other people upload the same CD again. On the other hand, all these copies are _not_ identical; CDs are slightly different, everyone uses different quality settings, and so on.

What would be possible for this is for Apple to create some software that runs on your Macintosh, analyses each song in your library, and sends a finger print to the server. The server then compares it to the ten million songs that Apple has, and instead of uploading 8 MB of song X, it just uploads a note that you have the song, together with your encoding session.

When you or I stream the song, we get not our version, but Apple's version, encoded with some settings that are close to the ones you or I were using. If you stream to an iPhone via wireless, you get a version that has a lower bit rate to safe wasting data.

Now if you have a song that doesn't exist in Apple's ten million song library, then your song is uploaded and used as the master until someone else has exactly the same song in better quality.

Quite a challenge to create such a system, but not impossible.

You're forgetting one thing. They already have a good proportion of your music. It's called the iTunes Store. All they will do is scan your collection for music they already sell. For those tracks they already have they would simply "link" that track from the iTunes Store to your account, meaning zero upload for you and zero additional space for them. You'd only need to upload those tracks they can't identify.

As long as there is some software that is clever enough to match music that I ripped from CD, and music that I downloaded from Amazon.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Apple knows what I purchased. I hope I can have them just reference all that when I stream to my iPhone for example. No uploading to the cloud since they have copies of everything I purchased on iTunes for the most part.

It also solves the pirated cloud content issue and time consuming uploads. Just allow you to use the cloud for products purchased from Apple.

 

[MacMan86]

...I doubt very much the above person actually purchased about 100,000 songs from iTunes, though there could be a lot of movies...

I think you misunderstood my point… I said that if hundreds of thousands of users each had one copy of Lady Gaga's album, no way would Apple store 100,000 copies of the same file.

 

[AAPLaday]

I will stick with Spotify. And for those albums which are worth buying, local storage.

 

[RyanGirtler]

Could be alot like LaLa

Heres how I think its going to play out.

1. The music you already have bought though apple will simply be avalible to you to stream to your device
2. The music that you imported via cd (or other method) to your library will be matched to the music that Apple has avalible and simply unlocked for you, much like lala did, no need to push it up to Apple, chances are they have it already. They may have to do something different for the one off songs and mixes that Apple doesn't have metadata for or cannot match
3. From now on, any music that you buy will simply be "unlocked" for your use.

Apple already knows what you have in your library, for those that have genius enabled, so this could already be set up.

 

[MacMan86]

I would say it is absolutely pointless if you upload a CD that you have ripped onto your Macintosh, and I upload the exact same CD, and ten thousand other people upload the same CD again. On the other hand, all these copies are _not_ identical; CDs are slightly different, everyone uses different quality settings, and so on.

What would be possible for this is for Apple to create some software that runs on your Macintosh, analyses each song in your library, and sends a finger print to the server. The server then compares it to the ten million songs that Apple has, and instead of uploading 8 MB of song X, it just uploads a note that you have the song, together with your encoding session.

When you or I stream the song, we get not our version, but Apple's version, encoded with some settings that are close to the ones you or I were using. If you stream to an iPhone via wireless, you get a version that has a lower bit rate to safe wasting data.

Now if you have a song that doesn't exist in Apple's ten million song library, then your song is uploaded and used as the master until someone else has exactly the same song in better quality.

Quite a challenge to create such a system, but not impossible.

Apple doesn't care about how you've encoded your music. Look at how long it took them to move from 128kbps to 256kbps. Most users don't care too much about encoding and bit rates. Apple would stick to one encoding quality and then use adaptive bit rate streaming if necessary for mobile devices.