Apple’s new iTunes Match functionality is an incredible boon to music lovers, effortlessly matching your local music to Apple’s cloud servers, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Instead, iTunes Match is the product of numerous inked deals between Cupertino and music publishers: no deal, and iTunes Match can’t mirror tracks from that label.
So bad news, soul and R&B fans. Numero Group has just vocally drawn a line in the sand: iTunes Match legitimizes piracy, and they won’t be part of it.
Numero Group’s statement on the matter reads:
“We feel that a great risk is being taken by Apple and the major labels that have accepted the terms of this new product wholesale with not a thought beyond the 150M those so-called “big four” will probably divide and pay to their top executives. By that, we mean that laws that protect compositions and copyrights for songs are, more or less, being trampled under these agreements.”
What’s strange to me is it seems like the smallest specialty labels have the least reason to fear iTunes Match’s “legitimization” of piracy, given how few people illegally pirate forgotten soul gems, or old jazz tracks. Even if it does, surely, making pirates turn legit is what you want.
Even so, if you’ve got a bunch of Numero Group tracks in your library, don’t worry about it: iTunes Match will still let you manually upload these tracks to the cloud. Apple doesn’t need anyone’s permission for that.
