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One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year
- jsherry 15y agoI'm curious whether this $24.99/yr revenue is shared with the labels who own the "pirated" music as part of the deal.
- klous 15y agoiTunes 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 15y agoAccess to the tracks on the cloud server. It's not like they're being deleted from your hard drive.
- jokermatt999 15y agoThis 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 15y agoOr maybe just make file system objects that appear to be songs?
- tptacek 15y agoIt seems to be using perceptual hashing to match tracks; you'd need to find actual crappy versions of the songs you want.
- sevenproxies 15y agoI 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- middus 15y agoSo 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 15y agoYour 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 15y agoThis 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).
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI 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.
- zyb09 15y agoEven 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 15y agoIt lets you redownload them in 256 Kbps AAC with no DRM. How can it make you keep paying to retain access?
- tobylane 15y agoAh.. 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 15y agoIf it's DRM free, how will the yearly subscription work? It's not like the tracks can expire.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThis 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.
- mdasen 15y ago1. 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.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI 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.
- ansy 15y agoThe 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.
- trotsky 15y agoIf 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.
- pinhead 15y agoWhat 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 15y agoConsidering 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.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoThose 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 15y agoThis 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 15y agoSeems to be 25,000 tracks excluding iTunes purchases.
- billybob 15y agoIs 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 15y agoPiracy 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 15y agoI'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 15y agoMost 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.
- pyre 15y agoI guess the question is: When I upload something to iCloud, does that actually get synced to all of my devices or do all these things just have streaming access to iCloud? If it actually syncs all of the files, do they go away from all but the original computer after the service is terminated? I.e. if you use this to convert pirated files to legal AAC, do all of the synced AAC files disappear, leaving you only with the original pirated MP3s when you stop paying Apple?
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- sil3ntmac 15y agoAre 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).
- mdasen 15y agoI'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_records http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Finding_similar_r...
- _delirium 15y agoIf 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.
- nkassis 15y agoI'm not sure how that would work, for the hash to be the same you would need the original song right? If they use sha1 or something like that how are you going to go from hash to song?
- _delirium 15y agoI was thinking of the case where iTunes computes hashes of your mp3s locally, then uses those to tell Apple which songs you have. You're right that if Apple requires you to upload the actual files, and then computes the hashes on the server-side, it'd make it much more difficult (you'd have to either have the original file, or generate a hash collision).
- FaceKicker 15y agoI doubt they would use an exact hash like SHA-1 though. It wouldn't allow for variations in bitrate, slight length differences due to cutting off beginning/end of the song's fade out/fade in, etc. I could imagine people figuring out the minimal bitrate that would produce a matching fingerprint (perhaps 64 kbps or even smaller) and sharing music that way.
- qjz 15y agoWhy does this remind me of sending "You've won a boat!" letters to suspects on outstanding warrants?
- paul9290 15y agoMy 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.
- quizbiz 15y agoPurchased 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 15y ago...and hands over your entire library to the music police.
- headbiznatch 15y agomp3.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 http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-235953.html
- doyoulikeworms 15y agoInterestingly, today's Apple announcement is harmful to Michael Robertson's other music-related endeavor, mp3tunes (cloud "music locker" service).
- periferral 15y agoLet 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
- ansy 15y agoArguably 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.
- astrange 15y agoPlease provide double-blind test results showing you can distinguish between FLAC and an iTunes Store copy.
- danieldk 15y agoThere are other reasons for using lossless audio files, such as archiving, and avoiding degradation through re-encoding.
- rawsyntax 15y agoalso disks are cheap, and flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD. You could decode it to the original WAV files from the CD if you wanted to
- pyre 15y ago> flac amounts to a digital copy of the physical CD So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden.
- premchai21 15y ago> So long as your CD doesn't include any square waves, you're golden. Could you explain what you mean by this? Are you referring to certain patterns that fall within standard Redbook audio parameters that FLAC then fails to encode properly? Or perhaps to characteristics of CDs or CD playback equipment that are difficult to duplicate on modern-day computers? I can imagine something like preëmphasis being problematic sometimes, but that seems to have little to do with square waves.
- hopeless 15y agoApparently, this is U.S.-only: http://twitter.com/#!/adrianweckler/status/77813858793832448 http://twitter.com/#!/adrianweckler/status/77813858793832448
- nkassis 15y agoI'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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wilschroter 15y agoI'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 15y agoI 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.
- jsavimbi 15y agoI, for one, will pay the $25 amnesty fee after being a pirate for fifteen years.
- dkl 15y agoWhat makes you think you are getting amnesty?
- jsavimbi 15y agoThe 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.
- ryanhuff 15y agoThe question remains if you are only "gold" as long as you pay your $25/year. Once you stop, does your newly acquired goldness go away?
- gonzo 15y agoNo idea, but if you were at the Keynote today, you would have seen the obvious, "nudge nudge, wink wink" in Steve's eyes.
- jsavimbi 15y agoAgain, the deal brokered with the music industry equates amnesty. There is no simpler way to look at it. Unlike your Flickr account, for example, you still retain purchase rights after your yearly account expires. The way I see it, that's acquiescence by the labels, via a third party, that you in fact have paid for that music, with the added benefit of an upgrade by a licensed partner. As if you handed Apple a list of music, no matter how big or distributed, that you'd like to own. Granted, under the conditions of their license agreement, but on an average .10% of the cost of the license per song (assuming 25,000 mp3's), shit man, you'd be soft not to take the offer at least once and upgrade your current library forever. Forever, you say? Once you pay for something, regardless of the amount, it's yours.
- Lewisham 15y agoWould have loved for this to have a more expensive option so we can finally get Napster/Zune/Spotify-style jukebox subscription.
- chriserin 15y agoThis 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.
- nkassis 15y agoThey already have it if you signed up for genius or whatever it's called.
- virtica 15y agoNo Streaming? Is that true?
- omaranto 15y agoExtra revenue stream for Apple: sell the database of which users pirated which songs to the RIAA so they can sue.
- ryan-allen 15y agoThis 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 15y agoHow 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.