People are talking what about pirated music?
Well to me people will pirate music. The music industry can't stop it. They just sue the ones who sell the pirated tracks. But Jonny home pirater who just uses the pirate tracks for his own entertainment will never get sued. it would cost the record industry more in lawyers fees then they would get back in a successful settlement.
So this $25 I say is a pittance of a fee. But it's a way of generating income from pirated music. I'm sure Apple is just using this money in part to upkeep the icloud servers. Apple figured out a way to get cash out of people who pirated (avoided paying for the music). The record industry got no money from the pirates. So +1 to Apple for a pretty nifty idea.
And on the other side the pirates have the piece of mind of legitimising their music. Sure it's not for the audiophiles. For most people who could not afford or chose not to pay for music in the past, it's a great deal. $25 to in essence legitimise our past crimes. Anyone who complains about this is either not the intended target audience of this service or just unfairly paying out a good service.
And about the Amazon/Google services. I'm sure the record industry lawyers are busy at work trying to find a way to find any little law they have broken so they can clamp down on them. But lucky for Amazon/Google the loophole they are using seems pretty solid for the time being.
It really shows the character of Apple here. Sure Apple is not god. But they didn't follow the same immoral path of Amazon/Google. They struck up the deal with the record industry. They did the right thing. To make sure all parties are involved and happy.
When this $25 service comes to Australia will I get it? Heck yes. It's brilliant. 25K songs a year and not 25K forever would make it even better. But I think time will tell which it is.
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And I have a question.
What if itunes match gets it wrong? And incorrectly tags my songs and I get the wrong stuff in return? I've often thrown in CDs into itunes and what itunes says the CD is, is very wrong. To this end I'm going to make a backup of my itunes folder before I do this itunes match just incase it gets a few wrong. Then I can get the borked up matched tracks from the backup.
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This thread is filled with iOS users jubilant that they now think they can covert their illegally downloaded files.
Of cause. Apple found a way to make money off the pirates. That is something the record industry could not do.
Also it makes more money of people people who actually bought the CDs from the store. Sure I could re rip them in 256 AAC. But finding and ripping almost 1K cds (many of which are singles) would take a very long time. I'm sure many people would be willing to pay $25 to have it all done for them and much quicker too.
Sure there are many ways to cheat the system. But I'm sure Apple is not worried about one or 2 tracks. But for the large libraries it would take either too much time or too much expertise for the average person to do. Mush easier to just pay the $25 and get Apple to do all the work for you.
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Another question.
Sure the Match will find tracks with exactly the same meta data as in the cloud. But what about people like me? I've edited the track titles and other various parts of the store bought cd ripped tracks I own. Will these meta data edited tracks be correctly matched or even matched at all from the cloud?
I don't want to have to re-edit 2k+ tracks one by one to be just how the cloud likes them to get the match. I think this is something we will find out in due course.
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If this is a streaming service from the cloud. It'll use our bandwidth. Say hypothetically 2MB per minute of music. And say 4 weeks a month. That's 168 hours in a week x 4 weeks x 2MB a minute. That's 1344MB a month if you stream the 256 AAC every second of the day. That's ok for most Mac users. But for iOS users who are on like 500MB a month and stuff like that, this could seriously eat into their bandwidth caps. That's if this is taken to be a streaming service and not an file upgrade service.
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I just had another idea.
If this is a streaming service it would do 2 things.
1. Make the ipod classic less attractive to purchase.
2. Make the smaller flash HD iOS devices much more popular.
You could have your 20,000 music list on your 16GB iOS device. And listen to any track you want. You'd just need enough free ram (or whatever) to buffer the stream. And you're good to go. So you would need to have a 160GB hard drive in your pocket (ipod classic) to have all your tracks at your fingertips.
Sure having a device spitting out 3G and Wi-Fi so close to your crotch all day makes me a little nervous. But it could push more sales of the iOS devices. People then could have one device with all their apps, and whatever on it, and all of their music (through icloud streaming) on it too.
TV lists) and so on. It would be a fantastic (even Apple-like) touch to leverage our own tagging adaptations linked to the underlying audio track when ours differs somewhat from theirs. That might be hoping for too much, but it would sure be a nice touch.
