So if you're away home away from your computer being able to re-download the song to your device via the cloud isn't as easy as streaming it?
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Little and Big Music Disagree On 'iTunes Match'
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So if you're away home away from your computer being able to re-download the song to your device via the cloud isn't as easy as streaming it?
Some were alive during the transition from vinyl to 8 track tapes, and 8 track to cassette, and cassette to cd, and cd to digital. Not to mention mini disk, DAT-digital audio tape for you yung uns, SACD and quadrophonic tapes. Oh, and I almost forgot reel to reel.
Does a download equal a missed sale?
This seems to be the line of thinking of record companies. Personally I think they are deluding themselves if they believe this.
As rockosmodurnlif noted in his earlier post -- I agree!
This seems to be the line of thinking of record companies. Personally I think they are deluding themselves if they believe this.
As rockosmodurnlif noted in his earlier post -- I agree!
It's not if your device is already full and you can't download anything more on to it. Plus having to download means that Android and other devices won't be able to use iCloud. (I use a N1).
This seems like a good way for record companies to get SOME money from what they've lost from piracy. Otherwise, they get none.
I'm cool if everyone steals from them. I don't listen to Lady GaGa and I don't care if her and her entire label go under. Many of the artists I listen to have been proactive in getting their music to fans and making money in creative ways. If you don't adapt, you die. Darwin taught me that.
I'm cool if everyone steals from them. I don't listen to Lady GaGa and I don't care if her and her entire label go under. Many of the artists I listen to have been proactive in getting their music to fans and making money in creative ways. If you don't adapt, you die. Darwin taught me that.
That's the beauty of this. There is NOTHING that keeps people from pirating music. Apple's goal, and Jobs has stated as much, is to provide a service that is so user friendly, and of such high quality that it presents a better value than pirating music. This service does just that.
On your second point, you are correct. $24.95 isn't very much money to spread around, but it's still more money than we would have made before. In truth, the vast majority of people who steal music wouldn't have paid for it in the first place. If I can get a tiny piece of 20 million illegal downloads vs. a bigger piece of 1,000 legal ones--I'll take the tiny piece.
The other side of this is that it sets a precedent for what labels should expect to be paid from competing companies with similar services. Google and Amazon for example don't have a right to copy your music and play it on an internet stream. They can let you store it all day long, but when they create the stream, besides the songs, they're using titles, names and artwork that are copyright protected material. For songs you buy from them, where they're licensed to do this, that's fine. For anything else it's simply not.
Eventually, these companies will have to pay up and the precedent that Apple has helped set will determine the amount that they will pay.
iTunes Match will be quite useful to me, a measly $25 a year, for upgrading the few thousand tracks I have in random bit rate from random mp3 sources over many, many years. Music that would cost me thousands more to upgrade to 256 AAC quality.
But will also be utterly useless for every CD I have ever ripped, since all of that music is stored in Apple Lossless. I have no interest in 256k versions of my lossless music.
But will also be utterly useless for every CD I have ever ripped, since all of that music is stored in Apple Lossless. I have no interest in 256k versions of my lossless music.
My only problem is that I converted all of my music to 320kbps MP3 files, so my quality will suffer. I don't know that I wanna do this whole iTunes Match thing just because of the quality issue. Does anyone know if there is a way that I can keep the quality of my music and still reap the benefits of iTunes Match?
The whole point of iTunes Match is that Apple does NOT have to store YOUR file. So the answer to your question is: No!
I re-call in the keynote but also covered elsewhere. To grab the tracks you have in the iCloud you go to the iTunes Store App and ask for them to be downloaded to play them you have then switch apps to the new Music app on the dock (old iTunes App) just like it was any other music file you added during the cable syncing era.
So i think you should write that man a cheque. It isn't a streaming service. Streaming would be useless for wifi iPads or iPod Touches.
iCloud is a syncing service... not a streaming service.
Old way: Computer --> USB cable --> iDevice
New way: iCloud --> Wireless --> iDevice
How do your songs get into the iCloud? Your existing iTunes purchases are already there.
Then, iTunes Match will scan your computer to see what songs you have... and will make new AAC versions of them available in the cloud.
Finally, you can upload anything to the cloud that iTunes doesn't already have.
That's iCloud in a nutshell.
In the end... all your music will be on a server for you to download to your devices... syncing your devices to the cloud instead of a computer.
You're right... it isn't a streaming service. So it's different that what Amazon and Google offers.
Plus you can still use your USB cable...
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I imagine a 16kbps file would not meet the requirements for an iTunes match. In fact, I doubt Apple will allow matches for anything below 64kbps, and possibly even 128. Even if they would allow it, it's doubtful that their song recognition software would work on a bitrate as low as 16kbps. Of course this is all speculation, there are absolutely no details as to how the recognition will work, what files it will work on, the sources, the bitrate, and the quality.
Could you record a song on the radio with your portable device, with radio chatter over the beginning and end, and still have it recognized? Who knows at this point, it will all depend on how strict the waveform recognition software is.
But I speculate that:
1) The song in question would be required to have a length within a few seconds of the iTunes equivilent
2) The bitrate would have to have an "acceptable" listening quality. No one wants to listen to a 16kbps mp3
3) The file in question would be required to contain basic metadata tags with artist, album, and track information.
If it were an artist raising concern over this, I might care more but they've been getting screwed by the labels since before iTunes and the labels have little interest in the well being the the artists, most of which make a lot less than people think, and some are probably in debt, even ones whom have major labels.
Some artists have benefited from people being able download songs off of bitttorrent. I think, what the labels will really hate is when it comes to be that quality recording is affordable enough that there is no need for a label, and other tools are there to replace them.
Some artists have benefited from people being able download songs off of bitttorrent. I think, what the labels will really hate is when it comes to be that quality recording is affordable enough that there is no need for a label, and other tools are there to replace them.
If you download stolen music, you're going to keep downloading stolen music. I don't think this will have much effect.
Don't keep your device full? If your device is already full of music sounds like you have plenty to listen to. PC free, let's hope Apple doesn't forget to give us a way to completely manage out music so we can delete them from out devices as well.
So apple should cater to other devices? If you want to be able to fully use an Apple service you should expect to use an Apple device. If you're on android, Google has an answer for you in their own service.
Below is a transcript of the WWDC Keynote where Jobs describes iTunes Match. I see how the wording about "same benefits as music purchased from iTunes" could be interpreted as download of the 256kbps AAC file, but nowhere in Jobs' description or on the Apple webpage describing iTunes Match is the word "download" ever used. It's always "upgrading" and "playing." If they meant "You get to download and keep a 256kbps AAC copy" then why don't they just say that anywhere? There's some salesmanship verging on misleading going on here. I think the "benefits" referred to are the zero-storage and the availability the iCloud offers...not the re-download of a file.
I'm reading that as these songs are available in your master cloud library to be played on any device, seamlessly, just as if they were "on" the device. Your $24.99 goes towards paying Apple and the record companies a few pennies each time a song is streamed, just like traditional radio royalties or the fees Pandora pays and subsidizes through ads or premium service. That price is much more in line with that sort of model that unlimited downloads of actual upgraded AAC files they have no way to verify you actually "own."
Apple is trying to sell the idea that it doesn't matter where the file is stored as long as you have access to it. And for those saying it can't be streaming because that's useless for iPod nanos or WiFi devices...the requirements listed are an iDevice and iOS5...even a download service is useless without an internet connection. This is the beginning of the cloud era. No internet, you don't get to play with Apple or any other like service. It's a library in the cloud, this is a new way of thinking we are being introduced to, and thinking we will get to (or need to) download everything is the old way.
Jobs' intro of this service is agonizingly nonspecific about the points that are being argued here, and I think he was very deliberate and careful about the words he used. The big difference Jobs touts between iTunes Match and Amazon as cloud-based music services is that you don't have to spend lots of time and money to upload all your music. But he is comparing them as cloud music services. Both will play your music from the cloud. It's just a difference of how it gets there and whose copy of the file is playing.
Nothing in life comes for free. The tradeoff for this ease of use has got to be that Apple's method doesn't allow you to download your matched non-iTunes purchased content of ripped CDs or whatever, but only play it from the cloud. It's not some "storage locker" for your files like Amazon, it is the entire iTunes Store library, and you are signing out their copy. The cloud is now the main storage repository, and there are some songs there you have bought, some unmatched that you have uploaded, and some matched that you are permitted to stream. This follows the "web song" paradigm of the old Lala service Apple took over.
It's entirely possible that I am wrong about this, but until I see it explicitly written or hear it come straight from Jobs' mouth that $24.99 per year allows us to download unlimited copies of unprotected 256kbps to any device any time I have to believe the Match songs will stream from the iTunes store. I'm not "making crap up," I think this is a reasonable and realistic interpretation of how this works. It may be an industry leading model, but it can't be that many miles ahead of Google and Amazon in terms of cost without some subtle tradeoff.
I am curious...what method do you all propose will remove access to these songs once a user cancels their subscription? How could Apple delete all these upgraded copies that were downloaded over the course of a year?
TRANSCRIPT
I'm reading that as these songs are available in your master cloud library to be played on any device, seamlessly, just as if they were "on" the device. Your $24.99 goes towards paying Apple and the record companies a few pennies each time a song is streamed, just like traditional radio royalties or the fees Pandora pays and subsidizes through ads or premium service. That price is much more in line with that sort of model that unlimited downloads of actual upgraded AAC files they have no way to verify you actually "own."
Apple is trying to sell the idea that it doesn't matter where the file is stored as long as you have access to it. And for those saying it can't be streaming because that's useless for iPod nanos or WiFi devices...the requirements listed are an iDevice and iOS5...even a download service is useless without an internet connection. This is the beginning of the cloud era. No internet, you don't get to play with Apple or any other like service. It's a library in the cloud, this is a new way of thinking we are being introduced to, and thinking we will get to (or need to) download everything is the old way.
Jobs' intro of this service is agonizingly nonspecific about the points that are being argued here, and I think he was very deliberate and careful about the words he used. The big difference Jobs touts between iTunes Match and Amazon as cloud-based music services is that you don't have to spend lots of time and money to upload all your music. But he is comparing them as cloud music services. Both will play your music from the cloud. It's just a difference of how it gets there and whose copy of the file is playing.
Nothing in life comes for free. The tradeoff for this ease of use has got to be that Apple's method doesn't allow you to download your matched non-iTunes purchased content of ripped CDs or whatever, but only play it from the cloud. It's not some "storage locker" for your files like Amazon, it is the entire iTunes Store library, and you are signing out their copy. The cloud is now the main storage repository, and there are some songs there you have bought, some unmatched that you have uploaded, and some matched that you are permitted to stream. This follows the "web song" paradigm of the old Lala service Apple took over.
It's entirely possible that I am wrong about this, but until I see it explicitly written or hear it come straight from Jobs' mouth that $24.99 per year allows us to download unlimited copies of unprotected 256kbps to any device any time I have to believe the Match songs will stream from the iTunes store. I'm not "making crap up," I think this is a reasonable and realistic interpretation of how this works. It may be an industry leading model, but it can't be that many miles ahead of Google and Amazon in terms of cost without some subtle tradeoff.
I am curious...what method do you all propose will remove access to these songs once a user cancels their subscription? How could Apple delete all these upgraded copies that were downloaded over the course of a year?
TRANSCRIPT
Now there's one more thing
a small thing
it pertains to itunes in the cloud.
As you recall iTunes in the cloud is just for the music you purchased from the iTunes store. Now at 15 billion songs, that's a lot of songs out there, that's a lot of songs purchased from the iTunes music store. But you may have some that you ripped yourself. And there's three ways you can deal with that.
You can sync your new devices over wifi or cable and you only have to sync them once to get that music on them and then you can rely on iCloud to take care of getting all your new purchases off iTunes onto that device
or
If it's just a few songs you love that you don't want to leave behind, you can buy those songs that you'll miss on iTunes we're going to offer a third way
Which is called iTunes Match.
What is iTunes Match?
Well, iTunes Match uses the fact that we've got 18 million songs now in the iTunes Music Store. And the chances are awfully good that we've got the songs in our store that you've ripped. So we wrote software to scan those CDs (the non-iTunes music) and match it up with those songs we have in the store. And so, we give that music the same benefits as music purchased from iTunes and it takes just minutes (not weeks) if you have to upload your whole library to some locker in the sky, that literally takes weeks. This takes minutes because we're scanning and matching your library so we don't need to upload that large part of your library. And those few songs that remain, we'll upload them. But with 18 million songs, we're most likely to have what you've got.
In addition, iTunes Match will upgrade those songs to match the 256kbps AAC and iTunes Match costs just $24.99 a year. So if you've got a bunch of music that you didn't buy from iTunes, you can get all the benefits of the cloud service and more in terms of upgrading your music for $24.99 a year.
Now if you look and compare that to some competitors, let's just look at Apple and Amazon and Google, you kind of get surprised because again, the library in the cloud, we scan and match, the other guys you gotta upload your whole music library. Again it's gonna take weeks. Music apps on your Mac and PC, your stuck with a web app instead of iTunes. Upgrade to 256kbps, the other guys aren't upgrading you at all. The annual price for 5000 songs $24.99, Amazon charges you $50 for the storage and Google hasn't announced their pricing yet. Even at 20,000 songs we charge one flat price, Amazon's up to $200 for the storage, and Google hasn't announced their prices yet.
So most of our customers won't need this because they've bought a lot of their music on iTunes but for those that do it's uh, an industry leading offer, let's put it that way. So that's iTunes Match, and it goes along with free iTunes in the cloud, and that's what it is.
As you recall iTunes in the cloud is just for the music you purchased from the iTunes store. Now at 15 billion songs, that's a lot of songs out there, that's a lot of songs purchased from the iTunes music store. But you may have some that you ripped yourself. And there's three ways you can deal with that.
You can sync your new devices over wifi or cable and you only have to sync them once to get that music on them and then you can rely on iCloud to take care of getting all your new purchases off iTunes onto that device
or
If it's just a few songs you love that you don't want to leave behind, you can buy those songs that you'll miss on iTunes we're going to offer a third way
Which is called iTunes Match.
What is iTunes Match?
Well, iTunes Match uses the fact that we've got 18 million songs now in the iTunes Music Store. And the chances are awfully good that we've got the songs in our store that you've ripped. So we wrote software to scan those CDs (the non-iTunes music) and match it up with those songs we have in the store. And so, we give that music the same benefits as music purchased from iTunes and it takes just minutes (not weeks) if you have to upload your whole library to some locker in the sky, that literally takes weeks. This takes minutes because we're scanning and matching your library so we don't need to upload that large part of your library. And those few songs that remain, we'll upload them. But with 18 million songs, we're most likely to have what you've got.
In addition, iTunes Match will upgrade those songs to match the 256kbps AAC and iTunes Match costs just $24.99 a year. So if you've got a bunch of music that you didn't buy from iTunes, you can get all the benefits of the cloud service and more in terms of upgrading your music for $24.99 a year.
Now if you look and compare that to some competitors, let's just look at Apple and Amazon and Google, you kind of get surprised because again, the library in the cloud, we scan and match, the other guys you gotta upload your whole music library. Again it's gonna take weeks. Music apps on your Mac and PC, your stuck with a web app instead of iTunes. Upgrade to 256kbps, the other guys aren't upgrading you at all. The annual price for 5000 songs $24.99, Amazon charges you $50 for the storage and Google hasn't announced their pricing yet. Even at 20,000 songs we charge one flat price, Amazon's up to $200 for the storage, and Google hasn't announced their prices yet.
So most of our customers won't need this because they've bought a lot of their music on iTunes but for those that do it's uh, an industry leading offer, let's put it that way. So that's iTunes Match, and it goes along with free iTunes in the cloud, and that's what it is.
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And no where does it say streaming. This would take a huge upgrade to the itunes store backend and I do not see it happening. The way I see it it will scan your library, all the music it matches will show the same way purchased music already shows up now (as in THIS). The framework for this is already in iOS 5. Now when you quite paying the $25 a year then these matched songs are removed from your available purchases so you can no longer download them on the go.
And to that, Apple is all about battery life and streaming has a very negative impact on that. Much more so then just downloading and playing. Also streaming 256kbps AAC isn't practical.
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I buy my music as CDs and rip them, I like to have the physical thing. No pirating going on here. I certainly won't be using iTunes match, as I see no benefit in paying again to give the labels "more feedback about the types of music that consumers are listening to". It's not that hard to plug my iPhone into my computer, I'm doing it anyway to load its battery.
iTunes Store already streams 90 second previews in the iTunes app and on iOS. No upgrade to the backend needed to stream the whole song in the Music app if it matches the song in your library. Nothing a massive server farm couldn't handle
I guess we'll see. Download of the AACs sounds too good to be true, and the fact that they have explicitly avoided stating it exactly that way makes me skeptical. Also the fact that it's a cloud service and clearly Apple's model including it's current leading hardware offerings are moving in this direction.
iTunes Store already streams 90 second previews in the iTunes app and on iOS. No upgrade to the backend needed to stream the whole song in the Music app if it matches the song in your library. Nothing a massive server farm couldn't handle
I guess we'll see. Download of the AACs sounds too good to be true, and the fact that they have explicitly avoided stating it exactly that way makes me skeptical. Also the fact that it's a cloud service and clearly Apple's model including it's current leading hardware offerings are moving in this direction.
Look at itune purchased tab right now, download from cloud. Everything icould has not been "it all stored on the cloud", it's been "it's sent to the cloud then sent to all devices". Photos, apps everything sent to each device, not stored on the cloud for all device to use.
Steve Jobs nor the Apple website talked about streaming either... they didn't even use the word "streaming" at WWDC.
If this was a steaming service... where your songs live in the cloud and are streamed in real-time to your devices.... surely they would mention 3G and other wireless technologies.
But they didn't... because iCloud is definitely not streaming.
I just went back and watched the keynote... and Steve said any song you purchased on your iPhone could be downloaded to your iPad or any other iDevice at no additional charge. Basically... any song you own in the cloud can be pushed (downloaded) to your other devices. Steve used the word push a few times.
Then we got the "one more thing..."
iTunes Match is what you use to have your other music be a part of iCloud... where you can download those other songs to all your iDevices.
That's the "same benefits as music purchased from iTunes" part of the keynote. But, iTunes Match comes at a cost of $25 a year to make your other song be a part of iCloud.
So basically... your existing iTunes purchases can be pushed (downloaded) to your iDevices for free...
And you can pay $25 a year to have your other music be pushed down to your devices.
I'm in the camp that thinks that iTunes Match is an absolutely brilliant idea. A lot of people decide to keep ripping tracks since most of their library is ripped stuff. If you all of a sudden have a perfectly clean library, you're going to be motivated to keep it that way by buying all your new music and/or continue paying the annual iTunes Match subscription.
I'd just like to see music drop back below the psychological barrier of 99¢ I find myself thinking a lot more before I buy now with tracks @ $1.29
Ultimately, artists make very little money from record sales anyway. Their income comes from live performances and merchandise. iTunes needs to push independent artists without a label who submit their music themselves. Ping is a good direction if only it improves its mainstream adoption.
I'd just like to see music drop back below the psychological barrier of 99¢ I find myself thinking a lot more before I buy now with tracks @ $1.29
Ultimately, artists make very little money from record sales anyway. Their income comes from live performances and merchandise. iTunes needs to push independent artists without a label who submit their music themselves. Ping is a good direction if only it improves its mainstream adoption.