
Google And Amazon May Have Just Handed Apple The Keys To The Cloud Music Kingdom - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/18/apple-cloud-music/
======
ugh
Not having to upload music would be nice but making a deal with the labels
could also lead to serious shortcomings. Google and Amazon didn’t have to play
nice with the labels, Apple does.

One consequence of that could be that you can only have music you purchased in
the iTunes Store in the cloud. What about music bought in other stores? What
about music ripped from CDs? Indeed, what about pirated music? Amazon’s and
Google’s cloud lockers work with all those files, will Apple’s?

If it doesn’t, its usefulness will be quite poor compared to what Amazon and
Google have to offer.

Given that the labels were quite miffed that Amazon and Google allow you to
upload arbitrary files I would be surprised if they moved away from that
position.

~~~
pkulak
With Amazon's service you don't have to upload anything you've bought from
them, so we can assume that Apple gets that for free as well. These deals are
so Steve can tell people they get to play their whole library from the cloud,
no matter how they got it, while only needing to upload songs not released by
the major labels.

~~~
planb
No way will this allow to listen to music not purchased via iTunes without
uploading. How would they prevent anyone from creating a 10000 track library
full of correctly tagged empty files?

~~~
tzs
The server could pick say 5 random offsets in the song, and ask the client to
upload the decoded data from one second of music starting at each of those
offsets. The server can then compare that to what it has and see if it is
close enough.

~~~
lurch_mojoff
Or simpler still - the iTunes application will generate fingerprint of the
whole audio in each file and send it along with whatever metadata is
available. Then serverside the fingerprint and metadata are analyzed and if a
certain criteria for a match are not met, iTunes is prompted to upload the
file.

------
dannyr
Apple agrees to the demand of the music labels by paying license fees -
additional fees for storing music you already own in the cloud.

Only MG Siegler can spin this into something positive.

~~~
ugh
My.mp3.com lost. That’s the legal situation. If you want to let people access
their music in the cloud without them having to upload it you will have to
come to some agreement with the labels. There is no way around it.

~~~
bad_user
Google and Amazon are bigger and could afford a fight. And I hope they do.

To me the fact that Apple will have deals with the music labels and will
probably only allow you to play music you bought from them - that's no
surprise at all.

~~~
masklinn
> Google and Amazon are bigger and could afford a fight.

A fight they have no guarantee they can win still. The jurisprudence is
against them, although Amazon definitely seems to think they can be
successful.

~~~
jrockway
When did fair use go away? I must have missed that.

~~~
chopsueyar
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com>

------
zmitri
As someone who has put together a cloud music player/site, I can assure you
that uploading is by far the biggest deterrent from people using the service.

In fact, out of my large music library, I only have a couple thousand songs of
my own uploaded. Out of a few hundred users, there are only 3 others who have
uploaded a similar number of songs. My service allows you to share playlists
with your friends and loads of users don't upload anything and are just
dependent on playlists form their early adopter friends. If Apple gets the
rights to skip out on having users upload it will be a huge win.

It also seems like Google and Amazon are in this space only for the sake of
trying to get people on their respective Android platforms (in the case of
Amazon up and coming) where as Apple at least has _some_ sense in organizing
music nicely and creating a nice playback experience. The Amazon UI kinda
makes me shudder as I always end up clicking on things by accident because
there are too many links/buttons embedded in each row.

~~~
kenjackson
Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music? I'd think that you could
just have a button in your UI that says, "Upload all my music in the
background". And then just do it constantly in the background.

I'd think that Apple could just have the same button in iTunes.

~~~
masklinn
> Why is it so hard to get them to upload their music?

1\. It's a chore to even do it

2\. Consumer landlines are generally very asymetric. I have an ADSL line
providing 1.1 MB/s (no typo) down, but 75kB/s up. I have 32GB of music on this
machine (in lossy encodings). It would take me 3 weeks and 4 days
uninterrupted to push that to "the cloud". Not only would make my internet
connection completely unusable in the meantime (I don't have a QoS router), 3
weeks before I can truly use the service is hardly seamless.

~~~
c1sc0
If uploading is so hard, then why is Dropbox so successful? I'm on the max
plan and I don't have any problems syncing. Sure, it takes a looooong time,
but I expect it so I'm ok with it. Make the uploading automatic & out of sight
and most people will have no trouble at all.

~~~
mynameisdom
I assume it's successful in part because very few people upload the full 2GB
quota in their first ten minutes of using Dropbox. I installed it, poked
around with a couple of MP3s and PDFs, and then stopped. I doubt many users of
Dropbox upload more than a couple hundred MB at a time.

------
PakG1
It's funny, in China, Google has this exact same deal as Apple with the
labels. google.cn/music/ is only accessible from within China though. But I
can go there and listen to _anything_ from _anywhere_ , as long as the label
has signed on. It works amazing.

~~~
forsaken
It feels like a failure of the internet that I didn't know this existed.

~~~
hvs
What does this even mean? How did the Internet fail just because you didn't
know about it? I'm pretty sure there is _a lot_ of stuff that you aren't aware
of, and that in no way reflects on the Internet as a whole.

------
Relwal
It's quite premature to call this game.

No one has seen Apple's cloud music offering.

How locked up will it be? How much will it cost? Will it support MP3s not
purchased from iTunes? Will it work on non-Apple-brand devices?

Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Good point. I would expect the Apple service to only work with Apple devices
and to have the same 3 device (or whatever the number is) limitation that they
currently have. I'd also expect it to be a pay service, as Apple doesn't do
freemium.

I'd consider it a major fail if it's not accessible through a web interface,
something I'm not expecting.

~~~
allwein
>only work with Apple devices and to have the same 3 device (or whatever the
number is) limitation

That number is unlimited. You're restricted to 5 computers, but unlimited
iDevices. I currently have something like 30 associated with my account.

------
dusklight
I wouldn't be betting on the company making deals with the horse company right
after the combustion engine got invented.

People are already getting paid enough by their youtube channel to work on it
full time. All it will take is one or two big success stories, of a new
celebrity that gets superstar famous purely from youtube -- and we actually
already passed that point a while ago, it's just a matter of them figuring out
how to monetize properly -- if new stars no longer feel like they need the
exploitative record companies, and start launching new music purely through
youtube and similar record-company-free cloud mediums, Sony and EMI will go
the same way as palm and nokia.

~~~
Jgrubb
There have already been dozens of these superstar from
YouTube/MySpace/wherever success stories. I don't know of any that haven't
converted their overnight fame into some sort of label deal. It is my firm
belief that the only way to properly monetize a music career that can't be
pirated and without record label "help" is to build a devoted live audience,
which takes years if not decades. Any sort of fame that's caught on the
internet is as fleeting as the next famous act on the internet, so while a
huge YouTube video or car commercial may guarantee big crowds for one show,
they very well may not be there for the next one. And define "paid enough".

On the other hand, you will always have plenty of young, attention hungry
people for whom the lure of a record deal and instant riches and fame will be
plenty to sign away everything for the chance at it. The point of the whole
Justin Bieber marketing machine isn't just to sell his product, it's to fill
the labels' funnels with the next round of wanna-bes. And to be fair, the
internet wasn't just invented. Napster was over a decade ago but labels, the
RIAA and all their purchased goons in the govt. have been very effectively
suppressing innovation through legal action for that entire time, and I don't
see that trend abating. If anything it seems like it's getting worse.

It's a bummer, but record labels aren't going anywhere for a while.

------
gnubardt
It's interesting to see Amazon & Google directly competing, to the point that
Google rushes a seemingly incomplete cloud music offering (also without label
consent) to counter Amazon's early control of the market.

They're also competing in cloud infrastructure, android app markets and
streaming video services. Their fundamental services are not that different,
both centered around search, though they don't really compete for it. Amazon
is a retail service but part of their effectiveness is showing you what you
want.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Supposedly the labels were asking Google to block torrent sites from search
results. A store is the only missing feature and it just wasn't going to
happen.

------
ajg1977
For all the talk about how Amazon/Google require people to upload their own
libraries, there's absolutely no way that the music labels will allow Apple to
skip this for anything other than iTunes (and probably only iTunes+) purchased
music. Infact I'd be surprised if there's anyway for people to get non-iTunes
music into the service at all.

~~~
ugh
(Apple doesn’t sell music with DRM anymore. There is only “iTunes+” music.
Limiting the service to legacy music with DRM wouldn’t make any sense
whatsoever. I’m not saying that the labels wouldn’t demand it, I’m, however,
doubtful that anyone would ever agree to that. It would obviously doom Apple’s
cloud locker right from the start.)

~~~
ajg1977
Nowhere did I say it'd be limited to DRM, I said it would be limited to music
purchased from the iTunes store.

Even though today's iTunes music doesn't contain DRM it is still fingerprinted
and Apple (and iTunes) know exactly whether a song in your library came from
the store or whether it was one you ripped yourself.

I'm pretty sure only the former will appear magically in your cloudstore
without an upload, and I suspect the latter will never be welcome.

~~~
ugh
Ok, sorry! I assumed you were talking about DRM because you mentioned iTunes+.

------
jsz0
Google and Amazon's approach has some big potential to blow up in their faces.
It's definitely going to create some interesting legal questions. For instance
Google's YouTube copyright filter applies equally to private videos. What
makes music different? It's a slightly different circumstance of course but
Google will have to explain why they think private pirated video is a no-no
but private pirated audio is not. I think they'll also have some burden to
prove only one user is accessing an account. For example when Google Music
invites are flying around what stops me from creating multiple accounts and
simply giving the username/password to my friends?

------
nicetryguy
Google Music service could work.

We have corporate music shoved down our throats from the 3 company radio / 4
company label monopoly.

If one were to reinvent the whole process, giving more profits to artists,
aggregating the best tunes 'pandora style', we could see a shift in the
zeitgeist of the music we listen to in general.

Let Apple have Lil Wayne and Lady Gaga.

With the advent of cheap professional home recording equipment and loads of
talent waiting for a break, the industry is waiting to be dumped on its head.

We are talking about Google here. Why don't you use Altavista or Yahoo what
that company does? You could always Ask Jeeves...

------
dstein64
One of Lala's products that I tried involved purchasing songs without the
ability to download, but they were stored in my music locker on their servers.
Although these songs couldn't be downloaded, they cost only ten cents a song
(I think, but can't remember the exact amount). While this was restrictive
relative to purchasing DRM-free MP3s, it cost a lot less and was all I needed
in some cases. I hope that either Amazon, Google, or Apple offers something
similar at a low price, as I'd like to give it another try.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
That was what made Lala so brilliant:

1) No subscription requirement. I'm not convinced that the average consumer
spends $120 a year on music and wants that expense every month of paying for a
MOG, Spotify or Rdio.

2) Extremely low per-song price made "impulse" buys easy.

3) Matching your library to their catalog without uploading.

4) A really nice web interface. Extremely good for 2 years ago. Amazon's is
so-so, and I haven't tried Google's yet (looks good from screenshots). I doubt
Apple will do one at all.

~~~
mynameisdom
Very well said. But don't forget the full-length free preview of any song. I
loved that "once and only once" feature.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I forgot all about that, yes that was a killer feature as well. That turned
out to be _the_ killer feature for Google's music search as well, and made it
infinitely less valuable when Lala went away.

------
chopsueyar
What about rolling your own 'cloud locker' to stream media to your various
devices?

Anyone who has decent upload capabilities (talkin' to you Fios) could have a
home media server stream to all relevant devices inside and outside of one's
home (audio is obviously easier than audio+video).

All I need is a semi-automated DVD ripper that can take a spindle of purchased
DVD movies and rip them all unattended.

In several years, why shouldn't we have a colocated home media server that
syncs with the cloud?

------
jrydberg
What about Spotify?

~~~
nhoj
Yes! What about spotify? Uploading your own music? Only playing songs that you
already own? Bah! Spotify came before google, amazon and apple with what seems
to be a better service..

------
ChrisArchitect
article title stunned me in an 'ah ha' sort of way -- sounds like a play/set
of moves right up apple's alley

------
scrod
It's not real Cloud Music until it's performed by Brian Eno — or perhaps it's
more similar to gas music?

~~~
r00fus
I prefer the original "cloud" music - Nuages by Debussy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_(Debussy)>

