Hardware 2.0

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

One more thing ... iTunes Match

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | June 6, 2011, 1:12pm PDT

Summary: WWDC 2011 keynote is over … and there was the traditional ‘one more thing’ at the end. iTunes Match.

WWDC 2011 keynote is over … and there was the traditional ‘one more thing’ at the end. iTunes Match.

What is iTunes Match. Well, in exchange for $24.99 a year Apple will let you take your existing collection of ripped CDs along with other music you’re acquired (legally, I’m sure) and out it on the iCloud. iTunes will basically scan your library and use a matching algorithm to ID the song and give you the right DRM-free 256kbps AAC file. The idea is that this saves you from having to upload your entire collection to the cloud (which could take a loooooong time). This means that the process takes ‘minutes’ rather than ‘weeks.’

Note: If a song can’t be matched then it will be uploaded.

There are limits … a 25,000 file limit.

Now, the devil’s in the detail here. Is Apple allowing people the chance to convert their *cough … cough* dubiously-acquired music into legit versions for a small yearly flat-fee? Seriously? Has Apple worked out a way for people to ‘buy’ themselves an amnesty?If this is the case then then I know certain people who will never buy music again.

Another question - Is Apple trading off (or maybe even profiting from) music piracy?

It wouldn’t be the first time …

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Topics

Keynote, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Apple iTunes, WWDC 2011 Keynote, Digital Music, Digital Media, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

FAULKNE 13th Oct

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The "certain people"

oncall 6th Jun

Who would "never buy music again" were probably not buying music in the first place. The music industry will go along because some payment is better than none.

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

Aerowind Updated - 6th Jun

@oncall That "some" payment might as well be none. $25 dollars a year is nothing, especially after maintenance costs and Apple's cut of the cash. What's left is a fraction of that 25 dollars. I can easily download over a hundred dollars worth of music within the next hour. All Apple is doing is enabling more pirates.

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Pirates don't need enabling

oncall 6th Jun

@Aerowind

Pirates pirate because they can and it's easy. It cannot be made more easy by what Apple is doing. We all know the potential financial renumeration of pressing piracy charges is net negative for the industry.

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What happens to the songs on the hard drive?

Will Pharaoh 6th Jun

will they be removed?

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See no reason why.

RH2010 6th Jun

@Will Pharaoh

Songs on your drive are yours. I see no reason for them to be removed. Suppose you decide not to subscribe to Apple's offerings in the future, you will still want to port your music to whatever medium or service is available.

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This worries me...

Ben_E 6th Jun

...I genuinely do not have illegally ripped/downloaded music. All my non-iTunes sourced tracks are CDs I genuinely own. And now I will be asked to pay $24.99 (?20.99?) a year for the privilege of listening to them on different devices if I want to be able to treat them the same as the other tracks in my iTunes library?

I'm sure there is some double-dipping by record companies in there somewhere...

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

kitko 6th Jun

"Another question - Is Apple trading off (or maybe even profiting from) music piracy?

It wouldn?t be the first time ?"

I'm sorry, but most civilized countries allow both format shifting and making personal copies of legally purchased music so moving your music from CDs to iPod is perfectly legal. In most of the world.

Only idiots in the UK own the same stuff on CDs, MiniDiscs and downloads.

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Smart move

RH2010 Updated - 6th Jun

This is a smart move on Apple's part. Why duplicate a stored mp3 file ten million times taking up a hugh amount of server storage space, when you can just pull from a single file.

Oh, and one more thing.... why is it that people complain about having to pay a small amount of money ($24.99) a year for a service that cost Apple millions to put in place in the first place.

If I was Jobs, I would be buiding this just the way he is doing it now. Smart, very smart.

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

opcom Updated - 7th Jun

Think about it. A subscriber's music file collection will be scanned to find and identify every tune. That result will be associated with each subscriber. Who in the realms of business and government will the information be made avilable to?

I'm not likely to subscribe but I like the idea of the service because it means customers do not have to carry a large storage device like a notebook or PC. - But do they have to do that anyway? All the music I have fits in less than a 32GB USB drive. Maybe I don't have much music but that is about 25 days worth. I'd like to know how many GB of music the average person has. How many GB does a serious enthusiast have? $25 per year is trivial.

I can also see this as a place to store and disseminate 'special' information by encoding data to a music format (DMT/OFDM or some such) and giving the file an obscure name (just like any other experimental music that sounds like a bunch of cats fighting with a bagpipes). Since the 'tune' would not exist in the standing database, it would be uploaded by the system and any conversions would be fine, since music is music and tones are tones. Once downloaded to a recipient's data recovery program and retrieve the message or data file. I'm sure there are snags. Not sure why that came to mind but it did. Coffee?

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What about piracy checks?

jasondavidcarr 7th Jun

It seems to me like bloggers are consistently forgetting one thing here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Apple has not made any kind of a stance on piracy regarding iTunes Match. The whole concept of paying to "legitimize" your music collection relies on the dangerous assumption that Apple and the RIAA will be doing nothing to combat pirated music within the service.

It would be very easy (and it's been done many times before) to collect MD5 hash tags of all of the music on your machine, and compare them to a list of known pirated music. This does not require uploading all of your music, and would allow Apple and the RIAA to easily identify music pirates with potentially court-ready evidence, or at least pirates who are careless enough to use the service.

Has anyone heard any details from Apple on whether or not they will be implementing anti-piracy measures? So much of what I've heard has focused only on assumptions, and I'm not so sure that the RIAA and Apple truly intend to "legitimize" pirated music. Perhaps, instead they're looking to combat it even further?

If anyone has any more information, please let me know...

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

opcom 7th Jun

Like a lossy JPEG, an MP3 can be reprocessed, and the hash won't match what they have on record for a particular file.

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

CowboyJake 13th Jun

I think this is a smart move on the record lables part. They are at least getting something for someone's pirated music versus getting nothing at all. As Gene Simmons has said, the genie is out of the bottle and you can not go backwards. The labels are seeing that and getting whatever they can from Apple, Spotify, Microsoft, etc...

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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RE: One more thing ... iTunes Match

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