Not having to upload music would be nice but making a deal with the labels could also lead to serious shortcomings. Google and Amazon didn’t have to play nice with the labels, Apple does.
One consequence of that could be that you can only have music you purchased in the iTunes Store in the cloud. What about music bought in other stores? What about music ripped from CDs? Indeed, what about pirated music? Amazon’s and Google’s cloud lockers work with all those files, will Apple’s?
If it doesn’t, its usefulness will be quite poor compared to what Amazon and Google have to offer.
Given that the labels were quite miffed that Amazon and Google allow you to upload arbitrary files I would be surprised if they moved away from that position.
> Google and Amazon didn’t have to play nice with the labels
Want to. Whether that will pan out is still to be seen.
> Apple does.
To an extent. Jobs's Apple has always been headstrong, and right now — because of Google and Amazon — they have labels by the balls.
> If it doesn’t, its usefulness will be quite poor compared to what Amazon and Google have to offer.
True, time will tell. It would not be the first time Apple fucks up a "cloud" service either. Still, I think they would realize how shitty the situation would be, and would have an easy time arguing that a worse service than Amazon's and Google's would not be able to compete, and would fail.
With Amazon's service you don't have to upload anything you've bought from them, so we can assume that Apple gets that for free as well. These deals are so Steve can tell people they get to play their whole library from the cloud, no matter how they got it, while only needing to upload songs not released by the major labels.
No way will this allow to listen to music not purchased via iTunes without uploading. How would they prevent anyone from creating a 10000 track library full of correctly tagged empty files?
The server could pick say 5 random offsets in the song, and ask the client to upload the decoded data from one second of music starting at each of those offsets. The server can then compare that to what it has and see if it is close enough.
Or simpler still - the iTunes application will generate fingerprint of the whole audio in each file and send it along with whatever metadata is available. Then serverside the fingerprint and metadata are analyzed and if a certain criteria for a match are not met, iTunes is prompted to upload the file.
Yeah, I'm sure the people working at Apple couldn't ever find a way to verify the identity of a song. They'd probably just write something that looked at the tags. Then when someone pointed out how easy it is to fake that, they'd just say, "Oh well, fuck it. Tell Jobs it can't be done! They'll just have to upload everything."
Sure people can make iPhone and Android apps that can identity a song from you humming it into a crappy speaker in a crowded bar, but Apple doesn't have that kind of programmer talent working for them.
One consequence of that could be that you can only have music you purchased in the iTunes Store in the cloud. What about music bought in other stores? What about music ripped from CDs? Indeed, what about pirated music? Amazon’s and Google’s cloud lockers work with all those files, will Apple’s?
If it doesn’t, its usefulness will be quite poor compared to what Amazon and Google have to offer.
Given that the labels were quite miffed that Amazon and Google allow you to upload arbitrary files I would be surprised if they moved away from that position.