
One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year - jsherry
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/06/one-more-thing-itunes-match-will-upgrade-your-ripped-music-for-24-99-a-year/
======
billybob
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).

~~~
drewcrawford
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?

~~~
llambda
_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.

~~~
warfangle
And if Apple or this service is de-legitimized through Apple going out of
business and shutting it down in a decade or two (hey, it could happen) - or
due to licensing disputes down the line with the record companies. Well.. Hope
you backed up the original files. That's a good question, actually:

If you keep the old files around, and five years from now cancel the
subscription.. ultimately it's likely you've paid much, much more than the
original collection was worth. Are the old ripped files still legitimate, or
do they cease to be?

~~~
guptaneil
All songs from iTunes are DRM-free, so they will continue working even if you
cancel the service.

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

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

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
mdasen
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
"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."

This is the curious bit. The music companies have argued in the past that I
didn't get a license to convert my audio into digital form (aka rip an MP3)
when I bought my CDs. So your postulate that 'you already have a license'
would not be valid to a company that held I didn't get any rights other than
the court stipulated 'archive copy'.

Anyway, I don't know one way or the other. But I have seen other companies
take a similar approach unsuccessfully, and its interesting to see how Apple
is moving the conversation about digital media along.

Since it would be possible to keep a non-DRM copy in perpetuity on disk, I'm
really curious about how this will implement. It seems on its face to be
something the music industry is currently very invested in preventing. And
frankly I don't think 150M$ + some fraction of $25 one time from iCloud
subscribers is going to cut it for them.

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

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

------
sil3ntmac
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).

~~~
mdasen
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Finding_similar_records)

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
nkassis
I'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
I 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).

------
antihero
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
Seems to be 25,000 tracks excluding iTunes purchases.

------
klous
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?

~~~
jokermatt999
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
Or maybe just make file system objects that appear to be songs?

~~~
tptacek
It seems to be using perceptual hashing to match tracks; you'd need to find
actual crappy versions of the songs you want.

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

~~~
nkassis
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.

------
fingerprinter
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.

------
tobylane
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.

------
wilschroter
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
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.

------
chriserin
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.

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

------
paul9290
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
A lot of youtube music content is not available on mobile devices.

~~~
paul9290
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.

------
ryan-allen
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).

------
quizbiz
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.

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

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

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

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

------
virtica
No Streaming? Is that true?

------
drivebyacct2
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.

~~~
ansy
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.

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

~~~
dkl
What makes you think you are getting amnesty?

~~~
jsavimbi
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.

~~~
ryanhuff
The 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
No idea, but if you were at the Keynote today, you would have seen the
obvious, "nudge nudge, wink wink" in Steve's eyes.

~~~
jsavimbi
Again, 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.

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

------
periferral
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

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

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

~~~
rawsyntax
also 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

      > 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
> 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.

~~~
pyre
I mentioned square waves specifically because I remember reading an article a
couple of years ago about how going WAV -> FLAC -> WAV on 'unnatural' waves
like sawtooth or square waves failed to come back out exactly alike. It was
just a little sarcasm on my part. IIRC the article was on HN so I expected
people to pick up on that.

~~~
astrange
That would be an encoder bug. I seriously doubt it still exists.

