We’re not quite sure how we missed this, but we did: in iOS 6’s first beta, iTunes Match has gone from a download-only service to a true streaming music service. It’s about time.
As you might recall, when iTunes Match first came out last year, while you could download songs individually to your device, it wasn’t streaming because the entire track needed to download to local storage first, where it would then take up space.
With iOS 6, though, that’s all changed. Now when you tap to play a song, it immediately begins playing, and you only download the song to your device if you specifically want to. In other words, you can choose between listening to a track right now with an online connection, or downloading it for offline listening.
This is a huge step in the right direction for iTunes Match. Most of the time, if I’m listening to something on my iTunes library, I don’t want to download it for offline listening… I just want to stream it.
Source: Apple ‘N’ Apps
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
13 responses to “You Can Finally Stream Your Tracks Using iTunes Match In iOS 6”
This doesnt necessarily mean Apple will keep the streaming function for the final GM iOS6 right
Its does ask to use your cellular data in the music app settings tho. Thats a sign.
I’m using iTunes Match and its streaming or if you go to the artist you can download it from the cloud. I do have a album art issues. They are not showing up using iTunes Match.
I could already stream on iOS 5 & iTunes Match. Once I tapped on a song it would start to play quite quickly (even though the songs was not on the device).
It’s always had the toggle for celluar data.
It’s an idiotic move for the iPod side of things; You can’t have Wi-Fi everywhere, and you can’t choose to download a song without playing it first! How am I supposed to download albums?
I got rid of Match when I realized that:
I would assume so to be honest.
this just may be my fave ios 6 feature yet! I love to shuffle all day at work (with no wifi) and now I can get the smallest iphone avail b/c I won’t need the storage space to store all my tracks….thanks Apple!
I have dumped iTunes and any Apple music related thing for Spotify, works the way i want.
Yeah, you can totally download a whole playlist. I do it all the time. Scroll to the bottom of the playlist, hit the Download All button.
Okay, i don’t really need that on my phone because of the instable and slow mobile internet connections.
Have you even tried it yet? You can downloads albums or playlists without streaming them first.