What I don't get is why it isn't just a generic music streaming service? If I have to pay $24.99 to access music I've already purchased elsewhere, this is actually encouraging me to go illegally download music to upload to the new service instead. I'm willing to pay once for music, not twice.
What I don't get is why it isn't just a generic music streaming service?
That's easy: iTunes is already the biggest music retailer, and there's ten billion plus tracks out there that don't need iTunes Match at all.
If I have to pay...
You don't. The $25/yr. is for an entirely optional service that you have not previously paid for.
this is actually encouraging me to go illegally download music
Nonsense. You're complaining that the service is only giving you the ability to do something you can (supposedly) already do, yes? Something you already (supposedly) paid for: what you call "access". But if you pirate, the same thing is true. If all you want to do is have "access" to the music, you already could have gotten that by pirating. iTunes Match doesn't change that at all.
1. That's what the comment you're responding to is complaining about (if I paid for it in the past, why would I hand over $25 bucks to pay for it again?).
2. Apple doesn't live in a vacuum and isn't stupid, they know they're effectively offering amnesty to pirates. Their bet is that they win by bringing people into their ecosystem, that $25 and a shot at future purchases is a better deal than the nothing they're currently getting from pirates.
I have roughly 700 albums that I ripped off little plastic disks in the '90s, all encoded at 192, all riddled with bit errors after being copied through 6-9 different IDE/SATA drives.
This announcement seems great. I will get way more than $25/yr value out of having reliable access to all this music again.
I am not hung up on "how often" I've paid for this music. I bought the CDs; if I wanted to, I could have archived them as carefully as Rob from High Fidelity. I have better things to do with my life. The $25 convenience fee here is buying me a lot of convenience.
If I didn't want the convenience, I wouldn't have to pay for it. I could just rerip. Let me work out my hourly rate and see what kind of return I'm getting for nevermind I'm just going to pay Apple.
I totally agree with you, I was just clarifying the other comment. I've been thinking about uploading my whole collection to Amazon, whose music store I much prefer to iTunes, but an order-of-magnitude price difference is hard to justify. If all this works as advertised, it's going to be an absolutely killer service.
Completely agree. Ideally they'd also update their Gracenote matching to match tracks to CDs that people hadn't ripped yet. If not, I guess the race will now be on to build a ripper that can encode as fast as possible at the minimum quality level required for a match.
2. Exactly! What I'm reading from this announcement is "Create your own music library for $25 a year, the caveat being that you have to go steal the music first and present it to us, then we'll add it to your library"
The number of people who look at this as "now anytime I want music in my iTunes account, I need to go torrent it first", who weren't already active pirates, is going to be so miniscule it won't even matter.
This is for people with existing collections of questionable legality or other provenance, who otherwise wouldn't join the service if it meant they had to give all that music up.
While I do think it's a good deal if you like the iTunes ecosystem, keep in mind you are paying $25 for music you already have, and you are also more fully committing yourself to iTunes. I expect Apple is losing some money on the service, but they have clearly made the calculation that locking more users in is worth it.
It's because they're not storing anything new. They simply distribute the exact same file that they've had on iTunes to begin with if it detects a match of you owning it. Other services (Amazon and Google's come to mind) let you upload literally any audio file you want (to an extent), regardless of whether it's on their music store or not.
Both schemes have their pros and cons. The comparison of upload time during the keynote was a complete joke to anyone that knows anything about this sort of technology though: saying how much faster the upload on your service is that doesn't upload to begin with to services that do is just silly.
The bottom line is normal users (ie those who "don't know anything about this sort of technology") don't give a damn. It's a few hours vs a few minutes.
I know I don't have the best internet connection, nor do I have the smallest music collection, but that's a whole lot of time to be uploading at full speed (which makes my internet unusable).
They mentioned that music you have that doesn't match with anything already in the iTunes Store can be uploaded to the cloud. I don't think we have any details about the implementation yet though.
Yep, could make itms match almost like a $25/year unlimited music service. Go find a bad recording of what you want then let it get 'matched' and you'd be legal and have a good copy.
Exactly - many of the other commentators don't seem to be getting this. This will be killer for people with tons of lossy, mediocre, napster era mp3s who have just not gotten around to upgrading to better quality stuff purely because of inertia.
It does lower the bar for people afraid of torrents. Think analog loophole, playing back a music video on Youtube and recording speaker output into a file.