Apple's Music Match: Innovation By (Record Label) Committee
from the is-this-really-so-special? dept
Well, pretty much everything in the announcement of Apple's iCloud "Music Match" music service was leaked or predicted prior to the announcement today, so there's not much that seems particularly surprising. Basically, for $25/year, you can have Apple scan your music and anything that it already has in the iTunes store will automatically be available to you on all your other (Apple?) devices. A lot of people noted that this appears to focus more on syncing rather than streaming. That is, almost all of the talk was how all of the music would be available to download to whatever device you had synced to the system, rather than any sort of streaming player. Still, none of this seems particularly revolutionary. The music match functionality seems identical to what Apple bought from LaLa nearly two years ago. The syncing features are nice, but plenty of other services have allowed file sync between devices. It sounds nice, but nothing all that amazing.The real story may be in the terms of the deal. While the labels allegedly turned down $100 million from Google to offer the same functionality, they took $150 million from Apple for this deal -- as an advance on approximately 58% of all of those $25 fees. Depending on how much music you actually have, the $25/year might be a decent deal compared to other cloud storage offerings, but Apple isn't going to make much money on it. Between the storage/bandwidth fees and having to fork over so much to the labels, this has to be a loss leader type of deal, with hopes that it sells more hardware (probably not a bad bet for Apple). Of course, that explains why the Google deal may have been "unsustainable" in the eyes of Google. It doesn't really have the hardware revenue to fall back on.
Still, it makes you wonder what, exactly, Apple is paying the labels for here. What's really being licensed? Effectively it's the ability to match the songs and put copies in a locker, which basically means that the labels are getting paid -- yet again -- for songs that they already sold to people.
That said, the other interesting thing about this is that while the labels were pushing everyone else to figure out ways to block tracks that didn't have a clear authorized lineage from being included in such deals, that does not appear to be the case here. As a friend noted to me after this announcement, if someone creates a dropbox or other mountable hard drive with a ton of music, and people mount it and then run the matching software on it, they could technically "launder" unauthorized tracks through Apple and have them in their "cloud" pretty easily. Which means... expect stories in the very near future from RIAA-types about this horrible "new trend" of massive mountable drives that people use to then dump thousands of songs into their Apple music storage. How long until someone tries to pass a law about that sort of thing?
The other interesting bit? While the big four music labels apparently got that $150 million as an advance, all of the indie labels? They get nothing. Not only are they not getting any advances, but they get a smaller percentage than the major labels. Apple pretty much realized that if it had the big four labels, the indies would more or less be forced to come on board at whatever terms Apple wanted.
On the whole, lots of folks seem excited about this, and as with so many Apple offerings, I'm sure lots of people will use it and it will do quite well. But I just don't see what's so compelling about repaying to access my own (legal and authorized content) via other devices, when I've already set up plenty of ways to do just that already.
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Filed Under: cloud, music, music match, record labels
Companies: apple
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Obvious
They're paying for righteousness. Court arguments, etc.
Nevermind the fact that my wife and I can't easily share music b/t our Macs (we have a lot of computers/iPhones/etc.)
I think there might be a breaking point on Apple's business model coming up.
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Re: Obvious
Nice that Apple was nice enough to let you pay for a way to get around Apple's limitations...
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I wonder how precise this scan is. If it's simply scanning filenames and/or metadata, I wonder how hard it would be to "fool" it with empty files with the correct metadata?
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(*of course they will store multiple copies of each song for maximum availability, scalability and geographical distribution, but you get the idea.)
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Call me old fashioned....
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Re: Call me old fashioned....
I must be old fashioned too because that was my exact same thought also.
The other thought I had is what happens if this service doesn't really take off - will Apple keep the servers up and running forever for the people who do use it?
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Re: Call me old fashioned....
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Re: Call me old fashioned....
I still don't see what's so great about Apple's offering, though. There dig on it taking weeks was a little ridiculous. It took ~3 days, which was annoying, but that's once ever. Not a big deal. I guess the key for Apple is their trademark seamlessness, but just in terms of features I'm a bit disappointed.
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Re: Call me old fashioned....
- Convenience. If you have several devices you want to use, this removes the need for syncing and keeping track of several playlists if you regularly fill up devices with different capacities.
- Accessibility. If you do a lot of travelling, you might not always have chance to sync before you leave, and you can't sync if you only have an iPhone/pad/whatever and not access to your computer. This removes the need to.
- Storage. I have approx. 130Gb of music but a 16Gb iPhone, which is regularly filled with apps and podcasts as well as music. If I can access more music than I can fit on the phone, this would be a good solution (I currently use Spotify for this, but I have a lot of music that not in their library).
- Safety. If that external drive is lost/stolen/broken, there goes your msuic collection. Here, you can access anything you want without having to carry the drive around.
It's debatable whether this is really worth $25/year just to major labels (especially if you have a lot of independent music), but it's not entirely pointless.
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Re: Re: Call me old fashioned....
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Data Usage
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$ per year....
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Re: $ per year....
And without having to pay $25 per year.
If you use Google and Android, you can do the same, but upload your cloud songs from your PC (not using your data limit) and then stream them to your devices -- without re-paying $25/year for the privilege.
When the RIAAcketeers sue Google for its cloud service, Google is going to have a good argument here that all the RIAA wants is to be re-paid for content users already own.
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OPTIONAL
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Very simple. The labels are being paid to shut up and go away. It's like patent trolling, but with music.
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This is only for music of unknown provenance. You could have 16GB of MP3 you picked up at Piratebay and the Apple will scan and match them in the cloud with pristine 256K itunes files that you can then play on any of your machines.
At least that is what it looks like to me.
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Re: Re:
1. They save a ton on bandwith, no uploading of tons of mp3s. They also save terabytes of storage since they only have pointer to files they already have.
2. Locks people further into their hardware and more their software platform. (ie I tunes and AAC file format)
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Re: Re: Re:
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Re:
That's assuming Apple can match those MP3s to what they've got in iTunes.
What if they can't? According to All Things Tech on NPR yesterday, if it ain't in iTunes, it won't be available to synch to your devices.
Tracks from artists who release their stuff free? Obscure artists? Foreign artists? Remixes? Mashups?
$25 a year so Apple can synch up only part of my music library? Screw that. Where's my Google music invite?
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Notification bar patented?
http://www.androidcentral.com/google-others-sued-microsoft-co-founder-paul-allen
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Re: Notification bar patented?
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Plus this...
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Steve Jobs is a genius
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Re: Steve Jobs is a genius
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Re: Steve Jobs is a genius
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Jesus you people are slow
You have one year to replace your dodgy files with the aforementioned cleaner, better versions, after that you keep all the stuff you replaced, but you cant 'exchange' any new stuff you "acquire" from sources outside the iTunes store. Maybe you'll even take the view that $25 is astounding value for money for the service and pay for another 12 months.
Get it now?
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Re: Jesus you people are slow
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Re: Re: Jesus you people are slow
FWIW A large proportion of my own gargantuan music Library consists of rips from CD's I bought by the truckload in my carefree youth, that still leaves plenty of tracks of dubious origin though. Personally, I'd gladly pay $25 not to have to upload ~85GB, so I'm hoping ITM makes it to the UK.
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Re: Re: Re: Jesus you people are slow
However, such tracks are a minority. Beyond rips of the 300+ CDs and numerous vinyls I purchased in the pre-digital era, I also have a large number of legal tracks given away by their publishers, as well as from an eMusic subscription that led to me buying at least 8 albums per month for over 4 years, lots of legal freebies from the likes of AmieStreet, last.fm and MP3.com, and so on...
It's rather pathetic that it's assumed that the only way to have a lot of digital albums is to pirate, and it's frustrating that this seems to be the basis of any conversation - I have need for a multi device, multi location service to access my music therefore I'm a thief. It's not the way to actually discuss these things.
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Misinformation
To answer a few questions in the thread - Jobs answered them in his keynote speech, in fact - any music Apple cannot match will be uploaded to the iCloud.
Apple doesn't sell MP3 files, only AAC files.
Amazon and Google Music (I belong to both, and have libraries in both) are nice, but not integrated with the Apple infrastructure. I can't download songs from them to my iPhone or iPad. They don't do gapless playback. They're only available where I have network access. Google music doesn't even allow re-download; Amazon does, but you can't do it from your iDevice, you have to do it on the computer and poke it into iTunes. I know Google Music has an 'offline mode' for android devices; I don't have one of those, though. MusicMatch isn't made for those folks (android users) any more than Google Music is made for IOS users.
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