When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the coming of iTunes Match at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, there wasn’t a single word heard about a streaming-music feature, something that people had been waiting for a (really) long time.
For over a year, music industry sources told CNET that Apple was trying to get licenses from the four major labels to build a cloud music service that would allow the company to scan a user’s hard drive, and then stream their entire music library from Apple’s servers back to the user via any Web-connected device.
On Monday, Apple finally launched the iTunes Match developer beta, and included, is the ability to stream songs. Apple describes it this way:
iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device… And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.
Cloud music is supposed to save storage space on users’ mobile devices as well as give them ubiquitous access to their music libraries. The iTunes Match costs $25 a year (scan and match up to 25,000 songs), and the feature also allows users to download songs to devices. ITunes Match is expected to be available for public consumption later this year.
The ability to offer people a scan-and-match feature is what the cloud music services available from Google and Amazon totally missed out on, by choosing to not license music from labels. Instead, users of those services have to upload each of their songs to those companies’ servers, which can be can take all freaking year if they have a lot of music.
Here’s another interesting thing: The licenses that Apple got from the four major labels included the scan and match. No one knows why the company didn’t mention it in their announcement. Okay, it’s not THAT interesting, but we figured that you might like to know.
