iCloud for music, to make spending easier

Why was iCloud created in the first place? Because Apple understood and, to a large extent, anticipated users’ frustration at having to transfer their purchased music between their various devices using inconvenient methods. And that convenient methods usually also mean methods that don’t involve paying, or at least not paying Apple. Which Apple sees as a problem.

iCloud is designed to eliminate this problem. Any music you purchase on iTunes, provided you are in the right country, will automatically be stored in iCloud and transferred to all (up to ten) of your devices that are connected to iCloud via your Apple ID, i.e., your login password. When your devices connect to the Internet, iCloud will upload your newly purchased music so that you can listen to it on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, or PC (where you can’t avoid using iTunes, which many Linux-like Windows users don’t like).

The question is how such an application would fare alongside “otherwise acquired music.” Apple knows very well that digitally purchased music is in the minority on music players; most of it is ripped from CDs or simply downloaded from elsewhere. And if Apple forced users to treat this part of their music library differently than music purchased through iTunes, it would create problems for itself, and the application would be used much less. It would not be universal.

Apple solved the issue of universality, firstly by charging $25 per year and secondly by storing your music “from other sources” in iCloud as well. And it does so in a clever way. It creates a digital fingerprint of the music, uploads this fingerprint to its server, and analyzes whether it already has such music in its iTunes library. Since iTunes contains eighteen million songs, it is likely to find it, in which case it will assign ownership of the song to you and use the iTunes version, which involves AAC encoding and a 256 Kb/s bitrate, i.e., very high quality. There is no need to upload such a song to the library; by owning a digital file whose digital fingerprint has been recognized by iTunes, you have proven your ownership. Music publishers will probably be silenced by part of that $25; two dollars a month isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing. When you stop paying, these songs will remain in iCloud; the $25 subscription applies to the Music Match service, which transfers your songs to the cloud.

Well, if iTunes can’t find your song, it will upload the entire song to iCloud, and then you can use that version.

Here, it is probably obvious how music in iCloud differs from other types of documents. Apple does not store each song separately for each person, but keeps a record of which songs users have and assigns them a centrally stored song. This radically reduces both the transfer capacity requirements, as entire songs are not uploaded to the server, but only their [“fingerprints,”]{dir=”rtl”} which allow for unambiguous identification, and the storage capacity, because each song is stored only “once” on the disk, along with records of who has the rights to it.

After the launch of the service, which is available and usable, including the paid part, in Czechia, the first problems appeared. For example, Apple misidentified some songs and replaced them with others, but – worse still – even well-identified songs containing vulgar words were replaced with more subtle versions intended for mainstream radio. Which, of course, users did not like. Well, growing pains.

We don’t have an equivalent service in Czechia, so it’s harder for us to understand what Apple wants to achieve with such a service and who its competitors are, but that’s not important for the success of the service.

Compared to its American competitors on the Czech market, such as Google Music and Amazon CloudDrive, which are not available, iCloud is significantly ahead, but both giant competitors have certainly not had their final say in terms of functionality, range of offerings, or price, so it will be interesting to see how they respond. However, it is good to note the difference. While iCloud is not primarily designed for streaming, it simply pushes music to your target devices on a one-time basis, Amazon and Google try to either stream music to you or allow you to download it manually, but there is no automatic synchronization of everything with everything. In addition, Amazon gives you 5GB of free space for music, and you have to pay for any additional space, while Apple gives you unlimited free space for music from iTunes, and you pay an additional $25 per year for other music without restrictions.

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iCloud for music, to make spending easier

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