One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/06/one-more-thing-itunes-match-will-upgrade-your-ripped-music-for-24-99-a-year/

by jsherry • 15 years ago

88 103 15 years ago

techcrunch.com

jsherry• 15 years ago

I'm curious whether this $24.99/yr revenue is shared with the labels who own the "pirated" music as part of the deal.

pinhead2• 15 years ago

I would definitely think it would be shared, I highly doubt the labels would agree to it otherwise.

trotsky2• 15 years ago

Reports were that they'd be getting 30% of it, and a significant amount (tens of millions) each in upfront fees.

klous• 15 years ago

iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?

jmelloy• 15 years ago

Access to the tracks on the cloud server. It's not like they're being deleted from your hard drive.

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

This should actually be really attractive to pirates. You know all those albums you downloaded, but could only find in 128 kbps? Well, spend $25, and all those can now be 256 kbps. I absolutely loathe iTunes, and that's attractive enough to me that I'm considering reinstalling it.

adolph• 15 years ago

Or maybe just make file system objects that appear to be songs?

sevenproxies• 15 years ago

I doubt that there would be many albums that are not available at at least 256kbps from various file-sharing networks. A pirate would have to first search their favourite file sharing network anyway to get the music they then have to pay Apple to listen to.

middus• 15 years ago

So Apple’s basically betting you’ll pay $25 a year to legalize all your content[…]

I really don't like the part about legalizing my collection. The music I ripped and encoded myself from hundreds of CDs that I bought retail are just as legal as tracks from iTunes.

czhiddy• 15 years ago

Your music is already legal. Not sure what you don't like about the "legalizing" aspect, as it doesn't pertain to you.

iTunes Match sounds like a way for the labels to get finally get income from the music pirates who torrent stuff off of Pirate Bay. A share of the $25/year is better than the $0/year they're currently seeing.

r00fus• 15 years ago

This just sounds surreal.

So instead of buying music, you can now "pirate" it, then allow iTunes Match to "legitimize it" for you.

Bingo, free "legitimate" music (I assume with artwork/etc included).

ChuckMcM4• 15 years ago

I suppose its possible that all of the music in torrents has been finger printed in some way or another which would identify it. Unlikely though.

zyb092• 15 years ago

Even better: Hack the iTunes Match service to let it think you have MP3s, that you don't even have on your system. Bam, instant free access to all music on iTunes. (well almost free)

philwelch• 15 years ago

It lets you redownload them in 256 Kbps AAC with no DRM. How can it make you keep paying to retain access?

tobylane• 15 years ago

Ah.. I didn't understand it this way before. I'm not sure how I'm justifying this to myself, as I have never bought an itunes album, haven't bought a physical album since 2004, and don't listen to music on my ipod, but I really do like this. It should cost £15.29, I'm going to expect £20 as a low estimate.

nodata• 15 years ago

If it's DRM free, how will the yearly subscription work? It's not like the tracks can expire.

ChuckMcM4• 15 years ago

This was the curious bit for me as well. So for $25 all my music 'upgrades' to 256 bit AAC, can I replace the MP3's I ripped with 128bit MusicMatchJukebox in '99 and are sitting on my filer?

And what is this $25 really paying for? Is Apple empowered by the labels to license me a DRM free digital copy?

If I pay the $25 annual fee will it automatically 'upgrade' any songs that come on over a torrent link? Is this really a one time license to every single song in the iTunes store? (Seriously, there is probably an mp3 or ogg file of every song in the iTunes library out there) If I put them all on my machine and then pay my $25 does it go 'ding' and now I own a legitmate digital copy? (if so its a screamin' good deal)

Can I get immunity from prosecution by this? I mean if I've got the insta-legit card in my iTunes and a metallica song comes across the intertubes and metallica comes calling can I just show them the itunes copy?

It's a bold move, and one which I support, but I wonder how its going to look once its put into practice.

My guess, is that if you have a $25 subscription you can put a CD into your Mac and it will 'register' those songs as being available to you. But we will see, could be very very interesting. Or not.

mdasen4• 15 years ago

1. Yes, that seems to be what Apple is selling. "You had CDs that you ripped to MP3s with crappy quality a while ago. Pay us $25 and we'll trade your crappy-quality MP3s for 256k AACs."

2. I don't think they're giving you a license. You're supposed to already have a license for the song you already have. Apple is merely replacing a likely lower-quality copy with a higher-quality copy.

3. Doubtful (to the point that I almost said no). You aren't going to get immunity from prosecution, but I'm guessing that Apple isn't going to try too hard to find people that have pirated their collection and I think the music industry knows that. It isn't Apple's style (there's no product key on their OS, no activation on their products, etc.). They might do something that tries to figure out if it was a legitimately acquired track, but maybe they'll just go the "we can't match that track" route if it's flagged. Just like #2, you're going to be in the same license and legality position that you were in before.

This is a convenience measure - for you and Apple. For you, this syncs your music between all your computers/devices. For Apple, if they can match the tracks, they don't have to store all the extra tracks as duplicates on their storage. A syncing service wouldn't be useful to you if it only dealt with the music you bought from Apple. They know that it's only useful if it does all your music and so they created a matching service to be bandwidth, time and space efficient. The service costs money to create and run and so they're charging a small fee for it. It's highly doubtful that it will change anything on the legal end.

mdasen4• 15 years ago

It isn't a subscription to your music, it's a subscription to the matching service. The point of iCloud is that they'll sync all of your music that you've bought from iTunes to all your devices. No more connecting your iPhone to your computer or managing the 2 computers you have with iTunes and how they get copied and such. Now, for music that you've ripped or bought from other sources, Apple is offering a matching service. Basically, it'll look through your collection and if they're in iTunes Apple will note that you already own those songs and allow you to also sync those songs via the new iCloud sync mechanism.

So, the tracks don't expire and you'll always have them. It's unclear if the subscription is for the syncing and the matching or just the matching. If it's just the matching, you can basically import your old music into your iTunes purchases and then not have to continue paying for it (assuming that you don't get new music outside the iTunes Store). The subscription also seems to cover syncing music that isn't in iTunes via uploading your MP3s.

So, it isn't a music subscription as much as it is a service/convenience subscription.

ChuckMcM4• 15 years ago

" Basically, it'll look through your collection and if they're in iTunes Apple will note that you already own those songs and allow you to also sync those songs via the new iCloud sync mechanism."

I know that is what was said, but its like saying "you just add extra water to your gas tank and you'll get mileage based on the number of gallons in your tank, whether or not its all gas."

The sentence construction is coherent but conceptually it doesn't pass the sniff test. Here is the rub.

"music that you own"

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 20 years you know that there are two interpretations of this phrase. There is the consumer interpretation:

"I bought the CD at the store, I can do anything I want with it, copy it, transcode it, destroy it, use components in a playlist I've created, or use parts in my amateur video on squirrels."

There is the RIAA/Music Label interpretation:

"You don't own the music you own a piece of polycarbonate plastic which can reproduce the performance of the noted artist in an sanctioned playing device that has not been modified in any way. You and no more than 12 friends present, and who have not paid you any consideration for hearing said performance. Any other use is strictly and unequivocally forbidden."

For years, even though the record labels had no way to enforce their view of what you could and could not do with the music in your possession, they really haven't varied all that much in their opinion what rights they didn't give you.

So when you say "music you own" it reads like you have the consumer interpretation of that phrase, and yet Apple isn't a consumer, they are animated pile of cash which sells player devices, so it is incredulous to me that the music industry would simply "let" them do what you have described they are offering to do.

If you (and Apple) had instead said to take advantage of this services it is required that you go to an Apple store with your original CD, which would be photographed with you by an Apple employee where they would record your name, birth date, receipt or other information you brought along to prove you had acquired the CD legally, and a sample of your DNA. Then they would exchange your CD for a unique identifying code that you could apply to your iTunes account which would enable you to listen to that CD via iTunes on any device connected to iCloud but would not allow you to transfer the song from the iCloud for 'offline' playing.

If you told me that that was what Apple was offering I'd just nod my head and believe you.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

I can't believe the fit the Music industry is throwing about Google Music and Amazon CloudDrive but they still made this deal with Apple.

Props to Apple. Shows they've got the muscle to get what they want.

ansy2• 15 years ago

The difference is Google Music and Amazon CloudDrive give nothing to the RIAA. But Apple gave over $100 million up front and will give a cut of each iCloud subscription to the RIAA going forward. The RIAA's outrage is just a shake down.

trotsky2• 15 years ago

If my past experience with the labels and intuition is correct, the labels were protesting because they wanted Apple's paid service to roll out first, perhaps had even given Apple assurances that they'd be first (related to the ~$150M upfront?). This would also explain why reports were that they were dragging their feet in negotiations with others, and why Amazon and Google may have chosen to go without. People selling digital music are very sensitive to the early mover advantage iTunes brought Apple.

pinhead2• 15 years ago

What I am curious about is if there would be anything stopping someone from paying the $25 once to convert all of their previously pirated tracks to "legit" 256 kbps AAC tracks...this seems strange to me.

neuroelectronic• 15 years ago

Considering that the "sync" just takes "minutes" I think the only thing you're getting is a bunch of freed up disk space thanks to a mass delete of your library and a 1-year licence to stream those songs from iTunes.

parrots• 15 years ago

It doesn't delete the originals, it just gives you access to the 256k versions from other devices.

wtallis• 15 years ago

Apple has not announced any music streaming service.

michael_dorfman2• 15 years ago

Those previously pirated tracks aren't suddenly "legit" because Apple transcoded them to another format. The $25 is essentially a transcoding fee-- it is not a license fee for previously unlicensed tracks.

antihero• 15 years ago

This could be actually pretty interesting, though iTunes generally fails to read many tags properly. I wonder if there's a limit to the amount of tracks. I'd definitely pay £20 a year for access to all of my music in the cloud legally, however I'm running Linux and on an Android. I guess it's just a benefit to being in the Apple ecosystem. It'd be wicked if Google did the same thing, and in the UK.

ddagradi• 15 years ago

Seems to be 25,000 tracks excluding iTunes purchases.

billybob2• 15 years ago

Is this perpetual? For example, could I pay my yearly subscription fee, torrent anything I want, upload it and get a legit version? If so, this is $25 a year for all the music I want.

Which, if the labels have agreed to that, it's very surprising. It's sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy: they start getting a cut of this fee from every participating pirate, which is a lot more than they used to get ($0), but a lot less than they wish they could get ($15 per album).

weaksauce• 15 years ago

Piracy is still going to happen; this way the record labels get a cut. If they make it easier than pirating it will be popular. I switched to amazon downloads because it was much easier than buying a CD and ripping it and I cannot live with DRM. Not to mention faster than waiting for the package to arrive.

joebadmo• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I understand the annual subscription. If I don't renew my subscription, does all my ripped/uploaded music go away? Or do I just lose access to more ripping/uploading?

irahul• 15 years ago

Most likely your converted music goes away(music you didn't buy from iTunes) from the cloud storage. The music on your harddisk isn't going anywhere.

hopeless2• 15 years ago

I'm wondering this too although it's a moot point since iTunes Match will be (yet another) U.S.-only music service

count3• 15 years ago

It appears to be the ability to 'upload' or match new songs and then have them wirelessly sync over the internet to all of your devices would disappear. AAC doesn't have the ability to 'expire' content, as far as I know?

mdasen4• 15 years ago

It doesn't seem to be a license. It seems to be an agreement between Apple and the labels that basically allows for fair-use treatment. Basically, if you already own the songs, you have the license and you're just having Apple provide a convenience service for you - syncing your music to all your devices as high-quality 256k AAC files. You aren't getting a new license for them. You'll perpetually have the files, but it isn't something that will change your legal status.

I'm guessing one of the reasons the labels agreed to this is that it provides them with ammunition that what Apple is doing isn't fair-use. If it was fair-use, Apple wouldn't be paying the labels. Therefore, Amazon, et. al. need to pay the labels for such services too. It sets a precedent that the labels like.

pyre6• 15 years ago

The fact that someone paid for something shouldn't hold any legal water. Just because you suckered someone into paying you money that they didn't need to, shouldn't be able to influence how a court interprets the law. Especially the way that huge corporate interests like that will pay large sums of money to err on the side of caution and avoid a legal battle.

drewcrawford• 15 years ago

Here's what I don't understand about your (and a lot of people's, I don't mean to pick on you) comments, please help me understand this:

Pirated files are not necessarily identifiable as such, not in the digital world. If I download some albums from what.cd, you can't tell they're pirated, maybe I ripped them with the exact same version of LAME. What I'm trying to say is that today, having a pirated file isn't a property of the file, it's a property of how you got ahold of that file.

I don't understand what you mean when you say the service "legitimizes" (paraphrase) existing music. All it does is exchange one set of bits for another set of bits, and this set of bits or that set of bits don't make an audio file legitimate or illegitimate.

I mean it's a bit like transcoding, isn't it? Except instead of doing it yourself, you're paying Apple to do it. The fact that a third party is providing the service doesn't necessarily mean that the process as a whole is legit, in the same way that taking a PDF of a book to FedEx Kinko's to print doesn't make the copy legit, in the same way that buying a Windows upgrade to upgrade your old pirated Windows doesn't make the resulting license legit.

I realize we're in kind of a special circumstance here because Apple has paid the music labels a lot of money, but we're just speculating about what the contents of their license enables them to do, which is probably only to be indemnified in the event that people use the service with pirated music (but not to indemnify the actual users).

Or am I missing something?

billybob2• 15 years ago

No, I see your point. I guess it's an open question for me whether this is a transcoding service or a music license.

Arguably, if I have a crappy MP3, and I pay Apple money, and they give me a version with a higher encoding rate, they have sold me the new bits for that song. Maybe the terms don't say that, but I think one could argue that I've paid for a copy of the song.

In fact, I think that the labels, in an effort to make us repurchase our records as tapes and our tapes as CDs and our CDs as files, have tried to tie the license to the format. So that seems to back the idea that this deal gives me a license for the AAC-formatted file. Whether I had one for the MP3 is irrelevant, right?

And would it be so bad if that's how the law sees it? This could actually be a boon for the recording industry. It could be win-win if pirates decide to do this: they start paying for music, they still get all the music they want, and they shift the distribution burden to BitTorrent and iTunes.

count3• 15 years ago

Once you have a receipt from Apple for the music, you have proof of ownership.

If you accidentally lost the CD between then and the time you get your PC taken away for discovery in a copyright infringement lawsuit, that's plausible deniability.

At least, way more so than just having 2TB of MP3s laying around with no media you ripped them from at all...

joe42• 15 years ago

It sounds to me like a way to "launder" possibly-pirated music. Exchanging mp3s for iCloud songs is analogous to exchanging cash for bank account money.

llambda• 15 years ago

The fact that a third party is providing the service doesn't necessarily mean that the process as a whole is legit, in the same way that taking a PDF of a book to FedEx Kinko's to print doesn't make the copy legit, in the same way that buying a Windows upgrade to upgrade your old pirated Windows doesn't make the resulting license legit.

Except that once you use iTunes Match, the resulting audio files are legally licensed, in the same way they would be had you purchased them from iTunes. Here the third party, Apple, is providing that legitimacy as a service ostensibly due to licensing agreements between Apple and the industry players. While actually grabbing the files off of a tracker is still not necessarily legal, the ultimate outcome of the process is that you will have legal copies, thanks to Apple and whatever licensing deals they've made. In other words, everyone wins: I get my music, Apple provides a (hopefully) decent service, and the music industry has found a vector for tapping into those supposed loss in sales.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

I don't know what the demographic spread here is, but I'm 99.99% sure that none of the 800 people on my phone/facebook pay for every CD they want. More frequently, I find people buy CDs to support certain artists, and not just to have a legal copy.

If this is the case, Apple's move is actually ingenious. I daresay a lot of pirates (who currently contribute $0) will pay $25/year for their music to be legal... for legal or moral reasons. The potential loss of revenue will lie on the people who buy 1-2 CDs/year. However, $25/year is likely more than the average amount these people pay, so it's still a plus, even if they stop buying the original CDs. I bet though, they won't.

I see this as a huge gain in revenue.

ugh2• 15 years ago

Torrenting those files will still be illegal and that doesn’t change after you sign up for this service and pay. It’s not an amnesty. (Also: Pirates are usually not caught by looking at the files they have on their HDD. Whether you have the original torrented files or Apple’s music files around doesn’t make a difference.)

You can get those pirated files in slightly better quality and you won’t have to upload them to Apple if you want to use their music locker. Big deal.

pyre6• 15 years ago

True, but if you 'convert' a large collection today, then you skip the possibility that Apple will implement anti-piracy features in the future. With Amazon and Google, no one can really be sure what the status is right now. Especially since you are uploading bit-for-bit copies of the files to those cloud services.

In financial terms, Apple is running an exchange, while Google and Amazon are running a safety deposit service. If someone looks in the safety deposit and finds illegal items, you are caught. If someone looks in Apple's music locker, you only see Apple's AAC-encoded content (though I guess they didn't cover how that works with music that you didn't buy through Apple and they don't carry on iTunes).

sil3ntmac2• 15 years ago

Are the mp3s going to be in the cloud? Or on my hard drive?

... because it seems like it would be trivial to "spoof" an mp3 for downloading (take a random mp3, perhaps cut to the correct length, add the correct id3 tags and tell iTunes Match to download it).

mdasen4• 15 years ago

I'm guessing that they're going to use an audio hash to look at the file and determine what song it is. It's probably more reliable than using ID3 tags which might get mixed up (especially around remixes, live versions, or just generally missing information).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Finding_similar_r...

_delirium2• 15 years ago

If the audio hash & protocol gets reverse-engineered, though, it'll make filesharing very quick--- instead of having to trade mp3s, you can just email your friend a list of hashes.

sil3ntmac2• 15 years ago

Ah, right, that makes sense. Well then someone should put together a rainbow table of collisions with actual songs, haha.

qjz• 15 years ago

Why does this remind me of sending "You've won a boat!" letters to suspects on outstanding warrants?

paul92902• 15 years ago

My iCloud is Youtube, Vevo and other legal services I access from my mobile to my non mobile computing devices. THus and for me I dont understand the hoopla of music in the cloud as it exist ubiquitously now and is free.

guelo• 15 years ago

A lot of youtube music content is not available on mobile devices.

paul92902• 15 years ago

Really i rarely have an issue finding current non popular (Top 40) music via YouTube. If it's a current top 40 song I will find it on Vevo if not found on YouTube.

quizbiz• 15 years ago

Purchased music won't count against iCloud storage. With that in mind, this is brilliant. Convincing enough to be habit changing. Pandora and Grooveshark apps are the only reasons I might not pay.

chrisjsmith• 15 years ago

...and hands over your entire library to the music police.

headbiznatch• 15 years ago

mp3.com tried something very similar without music industry permission in 2000. It was brash and very forward thinking; they pre-ripped a ton of stuff, would identify your CD when you put it in and then unlock it for you to be played through the site. My buddy's brother was working there at the time and when he told me they were trying this, my immediate reaction was "They are gonna get sued into oblivion." Which, of course, they did.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-235953.html

doyoulikeworms• 15 years ago

Interestingly, today's Apple announcement is harmful to Michael Robertson's other music-related endeavor, mp3tunes (cloud "music locker" service).

periferral• 15 years ago

Let me correct the title for you ' One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will DOWNGRADE Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year'. There much better.

I have my music ripped if VBR at low compression and FLAC. Clearly, itunes isn't dishing out nearly the same quality Music in return

ansy2• 15 years ago

Arguably 256 AAC is better than 320 MP3. I doubt FLAC files will even upload to iCloud so you probably have to convert them to something like MP3 or AAC first. That is if you are even seriously considering it.

astrange2• 15 years ago

Please provide double-blind test results showing you can distinguish between FLAC and an iTunes Store copy.

microtonal• 15 years ago

There are other reasons for using lossless audio files, such as archiving, and avoiding degradation through re-encoding.

matthewlyle• 15 years ago

You do realize you're the exception, right?

hopeless2• 15 years ago

Apparently, this is U.S.-only: http://twitter.com/#!/adrianweckler/status/77813858793832448

nkassis4• 15 years ago

I'm sure it will be extended to countries other than Canada soon ;p In a way I'm proud that we get excluded from all these kind of things. Shows our current laws are hated by the MPAA/RIAA people.

wilschroter• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how people are surprised by this. If you already have the track on your hard drive and now you have to PAY to listen to it then Apple isn't really giving you anything you didn't already have (convenience, obviously). It's a nice service, but realize that they have already lost the sale.

calbear81• 15 years ago

I would argue that you had a source file that may have been of lower quality and AAPL is basically giving you high quality rips of all of your music (DRM free) and hosting it so that your other devices can access it as well at any time.

jsavimbi3• 15 years ago

I, for one, will pay the $25 amnesty fee after being a pirate for fifteen years.

dkl• 15 years ago

What makes you think you are getting amnesty?

jsavimbi3• 15 years ago

The fact that I'll be paying $25 for a blanket validation of my music collection. Once the payment is made, I'm as good as gold. At a substantial discount.

Lewisham• 15 years ago

Would have loved for this to have a more expensive option so we can finally get Napster/Zune/Spotify-style jukebox subscription.

chriserin• 15 years ago

This is a treasure trove of marketing information. Apple will know your entire library and what you are listening to and when. Not exactly a privacy concern, but its something they can potentially make money off of somehow.

nkassis4• 15 years ago

They already have it if you signed up for genius or whatever it's called.

virtica• 15 years ago

No Streaming? Is that true?

omaranto• 15 years ago

Extra revenue stream for Apple: sell the database of which users pirated which songs to the RIAA so they can sue.

ryan-allen• 15 years ago

This is pretty awesome! It means I can access legally purchased and ripped CD collection via iCloud. I'd happily pay $25/year for that convenience (even though I don't buy CDs anymore, it's all iTunes).

fingerprinter• 15 years ago

How is this different than what mp3.com was trying to do about 5 year ago (I think it was mp3.com)? I seem to remember them having a service where you could put a CD into your disk drive, have their service recognize the CD and all of the sudden, you had the MP3s.

I'm guessing it is b/c this is 5 years later and b/c of Apple's clout, but I could also be missing some nuance.

One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

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