I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding Apple’s new iTunes Match feature.
It seems too good to be true, at only $25 per year.
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.)
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?
What would prevent someone from borrowing CDs from friends and putting them into the system as in #1?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.