Posted in: Editorial/ Interviews, The Business of Hip Hop | No Comments | Posted on June 21, 2011 by smalik

iCloud. How does it affect music?

In order for us to understand how iCloud affects music we must understand how iCloud works. Clouding is the concept of having a virtual hard drive. Your information is stored on the internet allowing you to access it from multiple devices. Great concept right! No more uploading your new CD to your ipad, then your ipod, then your computer. Upload it to the cloud and you can access it from anywhere. Your computer crashes, who cares, the information is still in the cloud! Great! The thought of losing important data becomes old news.

Apple has taken the Cloud concept and pushed the envelope further impacting music in another way yet to be totally understood. Apple will soon be offering a service called iTunes Match. iTunes Match for 25 dollars per year will match any music within your iTunes library and disperse it to any device your own. Here is how Apple describes it:

Here’s how it works: 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. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

Conceptually this is great. We gain convenience and it seems we lose some type of integrity regarding the ownership of music. It makes it easier to share music, which means over time it will make it easier to get music without paying for it. The question arises. Who makes the money? Where does the 25 dollars per year go? How does Apple compensate the artists and producers of the 18 million songs they match and give users access too? On the other hand it’s not very hard to gain access to music. This can be looked at as another progression of where music was inevitably headed iCloud just makes it easier and more convenient to control and access what you already own.

We do know Apple will pay between $100 million and $150 million in advanced payments to the four major music labels in order to get its iCloud off the ground, according to The New York Post. Reportedly Apple  has agreed to pay the labels between $25 million to $50 million each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing.

Ultimately the music industry needs to learn and adapt. Technology has move much faster than the music industry can adapt. The old model of making money in the music industry has become obsolete. It seems the powers that be are reluctant in embracing the new model, or have yet to figure out how to embrace it. The music industry reminds me of a grandfather that refuses to learn how to pay his bills on the internet, but keeps getting angry he is getting NSF fees. Change VS Convenience. Sometimes we must learn to embrace the inevitable. What are your thoughts?