Hooray! One More Thing! And all is not lost: Apple’s giving us all Cloud Storage lockers! It’s called iTunes Match, and it’s the much ballyhooed scan-and-match functionality that Apple’s been working on.
“iTunes in the cloud,” Steve Jobs says. ” As you recall, it’s just for the music you purchased in the iTunes store. But you may have some that you ripped yourself. And there’s three ways you can deal with that.”
“One, you can sync your devices over Wi-Fi or cable, and then you can rely on iCloud. Or, if it’s just a few songs you love, you can buy them on iTunes. But we’re offering a third way, and we call it iTunes Match.”
iTunes will now scan your music collection and match it with the 18 million songs Apple has in the iTunes music store. It takes just minutes to do, and matches the stuff you’ve ripped and mirrors them in the cloud at 256kbps AAC with DRM free.
It’s affordable, too! It costs just $24.99 per year. For everything, no maximum storage. This is what Apple built its North Carolina data super center for.
Wow. That blew Amazon Cloud and Google Music out of the water. It pays to sign the contracts.
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.
23 responses to “One More Thing: iTunes Match Music Locker For $24.99 Per Year [WWDC 2011]”
Why would you want to subscribe to this? Seams like a one-shot deal. 0_o
and when will we be getting our hands on this?!?!?!?!?
For pirate music too?
Will I beable to download a pirate song, and then have iTunes mach the song so that it’s automatikly downloaded to my iPhone ?
How is it a 1 shot deal? $25 dollars a year and anything you download (also waiting for the first app to fake it into thinking you have song X) and you get it from apple at 256k for free. It is basically a $25 unlimited music plan
I don’t understand. I can sync my entire library to every IOS device for free, OR I can pay $25 to sync some tracks and have my collection scanned for illegitimate files? I can’t find any upside to that deal at all.
Other than a renewed fear of the RIAA, what does this give me that home sharing and my dock-able iPod don’t?
I would pay $50 to have lala.com back, though.
“what does this give me that home sharing and my dock-able iPod don’t?”
An unlimited amount of storage that is reliably backed up.
yes, as long as you tyoed in the missing info (artists) etc.
so how the heck are you supposed to listen to music on an airplane, since you cant get signal for internet which would shut down your “cloud” of music?
Presumable… you might still keep some music stored on the device itself. Like keep your favourite songs synced up onto the hard drive itself. Kinda like how iPod Touches and iPhones are currently used.
Presumable… you might still keep some music stored on the device itself. Like keep your favourite songs synced up onto the hard drive itself. Kinda like how iPod Touches and iPhones are currently used.
Ok, I’m trying to understand this. I’ll use a simple example of one album.
Let’s say I buy an album on iTunes, it is downloaded to all my devices for free and I can listen to it on any of those devices forever for free. That’s easy.
Now let’s say I ripped a cd I had. If I pay $25 it will be downloaded to all my devices. Now does that mean I can listen to it on any of my devices for free forever or only for a year and then after that it’s only on the device (say my computer) that I originally ripped it on? Unless of course I keep paying $25 a year.
The dealbreaker for all of us outside the US is, it won’t be available here. Yet again we’re stuck with a hamstrung service because a bunch of music industry types don’t get that they need to adapt or die.