Explain Apple iTunes Match

[Chris Luongo]

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding Apple's new iTunes Match (http://www.fastcompany.com/1758202/music-executives-itunes-match-is-an-important-stepping-stone-toward-our-collective-subscript) feature.

It seems too good to be true, at only $25 per year.

1. I can somehow upload the music on my personal collection of CDs, and then listen to the same music on any other Apple devices I might own? (I currently only have an older iPod, though.)

2. It says I can do the same thing with music not originally downloaded from iTunes? I know that this message board doesn't allow discussions of how to commit illegal acts, including music piracy..........but am I understanding correctly that one could simply upload pre-existing MP3 files from dubious sources, and as long as iTunes has the same song for sale, it'll work?

3. What would prevent someone from borrowing CDs from friends and putting them into the system as in #1?

4. Again, I hope the moderators don't think I'm asking for tips on how to listen to pirated music. I'm just saying that it's how I'm reading the news article, and it seems too good to be true. Maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.

The token amount of $25/year doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough for artists to get paid for their work, yet it seems like you could just throw all your old Limewire downloads onto the service and get to listen to them legally? Doesn't make sense.

[jasg]

A1. My understanding is that the only music files which get uploaded are those that you did not purchase / is not available from iTunes.

A2. See A1, and yes.

A3. Honesty - and a limit of 20,000 songs.

A4. I think you understand it.

$25 a year is more they got from Limewire (at least for the labels, the poor artists are still probably screwed).

A related thread here (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=611527).

[Mangetout]

It amounts to them giving away the iTunes version of anything you already have (by fair means or foul, apparently). As they're giving it away, I wonder if they're even going to compensate the artists.

There's no technical solution (with the exception of CD-based DRM systems like Son'y much maligned attempt) that would prevent you borrowing CDs and ripping them, but that's the same as it is right now - if you want to spread a bunch of ripped-borrowed content across all your devices, you can already do it, it's just more laborious than it looks like it will be in future, if you subscribe to Match.

[phreesh]

As I understand it, Apple is actually paying music publishers hundreds of millions for the convenience of putting everyone's music in the 'cloud'. The $25 is a token amount and will likely fall to zero in a year or two.

Apple sees a market advantage in making music more easily available to customers and sees Amazon and Google making strong moves into the space. I take the bulk of this information from the below article in Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2296354/

[Candyman74]

The record labels have agreed to this (Apple is obviously compensating them in some way, but we don't know the fine details of that).

[MobiusStripes]

It amounts to them giving away the iTunes version of anything you already have (by fair means or foul, apparently). As they're giving it away, I wonder if they're even going to compensate the artists.


Devil's Advocate: if you already paid for the music, Apple isn't giving it away. The artist got compensated when you bought the CD. This seems like a form of format shifting.

[jasg]

Here is another good article (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/what-you-need-to-know-about-itunes-match-your-questions-answered.ars) to add to the one in Slate.

[Hermitian]

It amounts to them giving away the iTunes version of anything you already have (by fair means or foul, apparently). As they're giving it away, I wonder if they're even going to compensate the artists.



They are not GIVING away anything. You don't get to download an Apple version of your ill-gained MP3. You can STREAM it to any device.

As soon as you stop paying the yearly charge, your ability to hear that song is gone (well, you can still listen to your ill-gained MP3).

[gazpacho]

This service does not seem all that useful and it is getting less and less useful as time goes on. As flash gets cheaper currently 16 gig mirco SD cards are about $30 and 32 gig cards are around $70. The need to stream you music to your phone gets less and less useful. Streaming a huge library like pandora or similar services are great but streaming your own library seems not all that useful in a era of cheap flash.

[Munch]

not all that useful in a era of cheap flash.
iDevices do not contain removable flash memory. This frees up an iPhone's existing memory in order to dedicate it to video, pictures, etc.

[gazpacho]

iDevices do not contain removable flash memory. This frees up an iPhone's existing memory in order to dedicate it to video, pictures, etc.The argument is not really about removable flash memory it is that flash memory is cheap and getting cheaper. There will always be places where streaming does not work well that are ideal for listening to you ipod. Airplanes and the subway, long road trips etc. So you will need to have local copies of the songs.

[Chronos]

The token amount of $25/year doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough for artists to get paid for their work, yet it seems like you could just throw all your old Limewire downloads onto the service and get to listen to them legally? Doesn't make sense. As a rule of thumb, artists don't get paid for anything you listen to at home, or on an iPod, or on the radio, no matter how you purchased the media. Artists release CDs for the sake of publicity. Those few who make any money worth mentioning at all from their art, do so from tours and other live performances (and even there, it's mostly from the sale of things like T-shirts).

[beowulff]

This service does not seem all that useful and it is getting less and less useful as time goes on. As flash gets cheaper currently 16 gig mirco SD cards are about $30 and 32 gig cards are around $70. The need to stream you music to your phone gets less and less useful. Streaming a huge library like pandora or similar services are great but streaming your own library seems not all that useful in a era of cheap flash.

I have 200GB of music in my home iTunes library. This service makes it possible for me to listen to any of my songs at work, without needing a local copy. I think that’s pretty useful.

[N9IWP]

More info here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/what-you-need-to-know-about-itunes-match-your-questions-answered.ars

Brian

[gazpacho]

I have 200GB of music in my home iTunes library. This service makes it possible for me to listen to any of my songs at work, without needing a local copy. I think that’s pretty useful.I would submit that the vast majority of people have far less music than that.

To satisfy my curiosity I made a poll in cafe society about how much music you have.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=611683

[Absolute]

This is not a streaming service. You pay $25 a year, and iTunes will analyze your music library for songs you have not bought through iTunes, and allow you to redownload that music through iTunes on other devices.

The downloaded files are non-DRMd, 256 kbps AAC files. They're yours to keep.

You can already do this with music you've purchased through iTunes - buy it on a Mac/PC, iPod, iPhone, iPad and you can redownload it from any other device. With iTunes Match, you are paying $25 to Apple in order to use their servers to redownload music you have not purchased from them.

You are not paying Apple to give you access to music you don't already have. You're paying Apple to make it easier to have access to yourmusic from all your devices. It's a music synchronization service, not a music access service. You can save the $25 by simply synchronizing this music to your iDevices in the standard way (using iTunes). Unless of course you have such a huge library of music that it won't all fit, but you still want access to it from anywhere.

Frankly it sounds rather pointless to me.

[beowulff]

This is not a streaming service. You pay $25 a year, and iTunes will analyze your music library for songs you have not bought through iTunes, and allow you to redownload that music through iTunes on other devices.

The downloaded files are non-DRMd, 256 kbps AAC files. They're yours to keep.

You can already do this with music you've purchased through iTunes - buy it on a Mac/PC, iPod, iPhone, iPad and you can redownload it from any other device. With iTunes Match, you are paying $25 to Apple in order to use their servers to redownload music you have not purchased from them.

You are not paying Apple to give you access to music you don't already have. You're paying Apple to make it easier to have access to yourmusic from all your devices. It's a music synchronization service, not a music access service. You can save the $25 by simply synchronizing this music to your iDevices in the standard way (using iTunes). Unless of course you have such a huge library of music that it won't all fit, but you still want access to it from anywhere.

Frankly it sounds rather pointless to me.
It IS streaming:
Though iCloud itself will be free, to fully take advantage of the service, users will need to pay $24.99 for a service called iTunes Match that will scan their iTunes library and make their songs available to be streamed on any Apple device

[Mangetout]

They are not GIVING away anything. You don't get to download an Apple version of your ill-gained MP3. You can STREAM it to any device.

As soon as you stop paying the yearly charge, your ability to hear that song is gone (well, you can still listen to your ill-gained MP3).

Can you tell me where it says that? Admittedly, it's sketchy on the details, but the official page doesn't seem to draw any distinction between the way matched and itunes-purchased tracks will work (except for the obvious bits about the user's reason for having them)

[Absolute]

It IS streaming:
I don't know where you got that quote. In any case, it's wrong. Lots of people are confused on this point, because it does seem rather boneheaded of Apple not to allow streaming, but Apple has made it very clear. iCloud allows you to redownload (not stream) purchased music to any Apple device. iTunes Match extends that ability to music you have not purchased from iTunes. That's it - no streaming.

http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/07/wheres-the-itunes-streaming-it-would-have-crushed-the-carriers/

[Absolute]

Can you tell me where it says that? Admittedly, it's sketchy on the details, but the official page doesn't seem to draw any distinction between the way matched and itunes-purchased tracks will work (except for the obvious bits about the user's reason for having them)
You are correct. $25 per year gets you the ability to download a 256 kbps, non-DRM AAC file of any music on your computer that Apple sells (and can successfully match). You will have the option to replace your existing, potentially lower-quality copy with the higher-quality copy if you wish.

This article, written by a journalist who actually bothered to pay attention to what Apple said, provides more information.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/what-you-need-to-know-about-itunes-match-your-questions-answered.ars

[gazpacho]

Based on the responses from my poll and talking to people younger than myself at work, a large segment if the population has music collections larger than will fit on most iPod like devices. Thinking about this some more, I can see how it would be really convenient to be able to download an album or two from your collection when you are away from home.

[Gary "Wombat" Robson]

That's a good article at Ars Technica. Maybe that's why three different people have linked to it. :)

I think the service sounds fantastic. Apple Home Sharing already lets me buy a song on my desktop computer and have it sync to the notebook (and vice-versa), but I still have to remember to manually plug in the other devices and sync them to get updates. I also like that some of the songs I've ripped from vinyl and old CDs will be upgraded to scratch-free digitally-mastered copies. I'll finally get rid of those pops and hisses in Phantom of the Opera. That is AWESOME!

The question I still have is whether all of my smart playlists and meta tags will travel with the music through the cloud. I rarely pick an artist or genre to listen to. I have dozens of complex playlists for different situations and moods. If I can't carry them from device to device, I won't be interested in iTunes Match.

[TimeWinder]

But after all makes some sense for the iCloud not to stream anything, music that is, on the devices.

Fundamentally, this appears to be the primary difference between Apple's "cloud" and everybody else's. Google/Microsoft/Amazon, etc. expect you to put your data on the remote servers, and then let you access it from anywhere via streaming.

Apple's vision seems to be that the "cloud" is not (primarily at least) storage, but rather a synchronization mechanism: The apps/music/photos/etc stay on the devices (and hence are availble in situations where the network is not available), but are readily (and often automatically) transferred between these devices when networking is available. I'm sure there will be mechanisms to look at your photostream via the web, but that's not the general purpose.

Even more fundamentally: Everybody else is banking on data becoming remote and apps moving to the web. Apple's banking on people wanting their data to remain local (but ubiquitous across devices) and their apps native. Time will tell which is the right answer (probably some combination).

[Gary "Wombat" Robson]

Even more fundamentally: Everybody else is banking on data becoming remote and apps moving to the web. Apple's banking on people wanting their data to remain local (but ubiquitous across devices) and their apps native. Time will tell which is the right answer (probably some combination).
For those of us who don't live somewhere like Redmond, network outages and poor cellphone coverage are facts of life. I simply won't accept a solution that means I can't listen to music on a plane, or in a Yellowstone campground, or on a beach in Mexico, or in that cellphone dead zone just outside of town.

[TimeWinder]

For those of us who don't live somewhere like Redmond, network outages and poor cellphone coverage are facts of life. I simply won't accept a solution that means I can't listen to music on a plane, or in a Yellowstone campground, or on a beach in Mexico, or in that cellphone dead zone just outside of town.

Heh. Don't bet too much on the infrastructure for those of us who *do* live somewhere like Redmond, for that matter. My phone is a pay-per-minute T-Mobile "burn phone" because it's the only thing that gets even partial coverage at my swanky Redmond address.

I don't think anybody's really talking about forcing you to move all your date remote (well, except maybe Google); just extending what you have available in those places where you do have network access. Your mobile phone/iPad/whatever probably doesn't have more than a couple hundred gig available--maybe a lot less. Even laptops are getting pretty constrained as they move to SSDs--although I expect that will fix itself in short order.

That's enough to hold a few hours of video, but it won't hold even a modest movie collection. Streaming means you can supplement it sometimes (and Apple's mechanism means that you can swap what's currently on the device sometimes) when networking is available, but local content will always be there.

[beowulff]

I don't know where you got that quote. In any case, it's wrong. Lots of people are confused on this point, because it does seem rather boneheaded of Apple not to allow streaming, but Apple has made it very clear. iCloud allows you to redownload (not stream) purchased music to any Apple device. iTunes Match extends that ability to music you have not purchased from iTunes. That's it - no streaming.

http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/07/wheres-the-itunes-streaming-it-would-have-crushed-the-carriers/

OK, I know that this is a semi-zombified thread, but I thought I’d check back in.
I sign up for music match, and synced all my iTunes libraries (10,000+ songs), and can confirm that the service does stream music.
On my iPhone (for example), I can ask SIRI to play any song in my library, and after a short pause, the song will start playing. There is no need to download the song to the phone first - it streams over 3G or WiFi.

[Garfield226]

OK, I know that this is a semi-zombified thread, but I thought I’d check back in.
I sign up for music match, and synced all my iTunes libraries (10,000+ songs), and can confirm that the service does stream music.
On my iPhone (for example), I can ask SIRI to play any song in my library, and after a short pause, the song will start playing. There is no need to download the song to the phone first - it streams over 3G or WiFi.

You can play as it's being downloaded, but once you've downloaded it, it exists on your device until you remove it (or perhaps if you sync again, I'm not sure).

And you can also delete, and redownload music on your desktop.

It's not "streaming" in the sense that Pandora or Last.fm or Spotify are streaming. It's "streaming" in that you can play the file as you're downloading it. But you're downloading it, and get to keep it.

[phreesh]

The thing I've discovered is that it really slows down iTunes on my phone. Every move I make now takes several seconds. It's quite irritating.

However, now my work computer has all my music on it and I can use my new iPad to listen to my entire library. Cool