Sony Music Now Signed On For Apple's Cloud
Apple is again another step closer to launching its feature-packed cloud music service.
Thursday brought reports that Apple struck a deal with EMI Group for its upcoming cloud-based music service, indicating that the company still needed to reach an agreement with the other two major record labels –Sony Music and Universal Music – before the service officially (and legitimately) goes live. Apple previously scored a licensing deal with Warner Music first back in April.
Following Thursday's report, Bloomberg on Friday revealed that Apple landed a licensing agreement with Sony Music, inching it one label closer to possibly launching the new cloud-based music service during its Worldwide Developers Conference taking place in San Francisco on June 6 – 10. Insiders close to the situation said that Apple is close to closing negotiations with the fourth and final label, Universal Music. But even with the four major labels under its belt, Apple will still need to pursue agreements with music publishers which control different rights than the actual labels.
For a while it was speculated that Sony wouldn't agree to Apple cloud service after launching its own Qriocity streaming music offering here in the States back in February. There was even talk that Sony Music may even pull out of iTunes, that it would be a conflict on interest. But Sony assured consumers that a withdrawal wasn't in the books, that it still generated tons of revenue from Apple's platform and saw no sign of departure in the immediate future.
Once launched, consumers will have the ability to purchase and store the tunes on Apple's servers rather than download them locally to a PC or iOS device said sources who requested to remain unnamed. While no additional details were provided, it's likely that consumers will be able to both stream and cache music, the latter for listening when offline.
Currently it's unknown if Apple plans to charge for the new service. The music plans may actually be part of a larger overhaul of Apple's MobileMe platform which allows users to store pictures, contacts and other files directly on Apple's servers which can be accessed from the Internet. This will reportedly put Apple in a better place to compete with Google's non-music services and the Android platform.
Typically Steve Jobs uses the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to reveal the latest iPhone, but insiders claim that won't happen this year. Instead, it may serve as the launching pad for the overhauled MobileMe and the cloud-based music service. Apple already said that the event will focus on software, ranging from the new version of iOS to the latest Mac operating system called Lion.
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This sounds like a great enhancement to the MobileMe service - IF streaming times are fast enough to supply the on-demand desire. If it takes an 'extended' period to download a song from my cloud, I might be more inclined to pre-load it the old fashioned way. I hope Apple doesn't change MobileMe too much with the expected enhancements and then jack up the price. It's a great value currently, but too much more, and I'll pass. That's just me though.
"i" this "me" that... So Apple thinks their consumer metric are a bunch of self absorbed, self centered children?.
Very nice pic
Brilliant idea and far better than what Google or Amazon offer.
With Google/Amazon I first need to upload my music collection to them, and depending on how much music I've got that's going to take some time. Once it's uploaded, I'm going to have to pay for storage of all those GB's they're keeping for me.
With Apple, any song I have that's also part of their catalog doesn't need to be uploaded - it'll play straight from the main copy on their servers instead. With Google/Amazon, you could literally have the same song stored hundreds of thousands of times over - one copy for each person in their own private "music locker". Not very efficient, IMO.
Without any deals signed with the labels, Google/Amazon aren't going to be able to make a single copy of a song and stream it to every user who has this song in their "music locker", so they can't get around this "storing one song numerous times" issue. So Google/Amazon will require far more server storage than Apple to provide could music.
And with Apple, I can still upload my own content if I wish. The big difference is that of my 30GB of music, probably 25GB will already be in Apple's servers and I'll only need to upload the remaining 5GB of my own stuff. Much easier to do, and I'm going to pay less for storing 5GB than 30GB.
So I get the best features of Google/Amazon (my own music locker & streaming to anywhere) without having to upload everything I've got or pay a larger storage fee.
Hate on Apple all you want, but they got this one right.
Music is listened to by a much wider audience than geeks and technical people, and it is these "other people" who determine the success of Apple iPads, iPods and Mac Computers because they get the 10 hours of Video, the 10 hours of Music or the 6 - 10 hours of Computing. (which they paid for).
They want "easy purchase" and "easy pay", now give them "easy play" and you have a winner.
Because it works like it says on the side of the box!
It's like they took all the hate from computing and mashed it all together.
Apple: Closed walled orchard.
Sony: Rootkits, false advertising, well, you know this paragraph could probably fill half the internet so I'll stop here.
Cloud: Online backups make sense, and seriously hungry algorithms, but office apps, really? and letting you see my files unencrypted just for kicks & hacks? Nyet.
I'm not sure they left anything out - I mean, there's DRM, streaming instead of DL to burn our bandwidth, region locking.
So they signed an agreement with Sony.
Sony and Apple... go figure.