> I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "fre

> I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again). This is how I see it too. Customers with smaller collections (i.e. the majority) will have higher margins, and effectively subsidise those with larger (and therefore with larger royalty payouts) collections. Works similarly to the way ISP's do: users who use say, 20GB of a 60GB cap are more profitable than a user who uses 145GB of a 150GB. Bandwidth costs are small, but on a large scale, it works.