Digital Music Meets Its Match in Apple iCloud
One of the more interesting ideas in the new wave of cloud-computing services is the music locker. This is a service that lets consumers store their music collections on a remote server and access them from any device, either by streaming the tunes or downloading them. Amazon and Google offer such locker services. But they have a big downside: You have to upload all your music to your locker first. If you have a collection of several thousand songs or more, that can take days as most home Internet connections have slow upload speeds, even if their download speeds are decent.
Now, Apple has introduced a locker service that mostly eliminates that problem by doing away with the need to upload the vast majority of your music, while still allowing you to populate your locker with your songs quickly and easily. It’s called iTunes Match, and it’s the last piece in the company’s rollout of its massive iCloud initiative, which includes things like wireless synchronization of contacts and calendars. Here’s how it works. Instead of making you upload your song files to Apple’s servers, iTunes Match scans the iTunes library on your Macs or Windows PCs, then matches the titles you have with the 20 million songs Apple has the right to distribute via its iTunes store. If your songs are included in that 20 million, Apple simply places them in your online locker. In almost all cases, users will be left with only a small remnant of songs to upload—such as recordings by garage bands. (ITunes Match works only for digital music, not movies, TV shows or audiobooks, even if they’re available in iTunes.) Once the songs are in the cloud, they also appear in your library in iTunes on computers, or in the Music apps on iPads, iPhones and iPod touch devices. You can stream the music, or press an icon with a downward arrow inside a cloud to download it. You can include up to 10 devices in iTunes Match. Plus, iTunes Match—which costs $25 a year for up to 25,000 songs—covers any song you own, regardless of how you obtained it. That includes songs purchased from non-Apple music services or imported from CDs, or even those that were downloaded illegally.
Google’s music locker is currently free, but limited to 20,000 songs. Amazon is now offering unlimited music storage for $20 a year as part of a broader plan that allows storing various types of files in the cloud. One nice aspect of iTunes Match is that even if your songs are in a lower-quality format before they go into your iTunes Match locker, Apple streams or downloads them in a relatively high-quality format.