GidoGeek

What you need to know about iTunes Match →

Ars Technica has a nice breakdown with some crucial information on how iTunes Match works. It contains nothing to surprising and is all alongs the lines you’ve come to expect from Apple really.

If you don’t renew the yearly $25 subscription, your iCloud store goes away. iTunes purchases will still be available to all devices, and anything that you have downloaded from iCloud to you devices you keep. This includes iTunes Plus versions you have chosen to replace older, lower quality rips in your main iTunes library. Apple explained that replacing those lower-quality rips is optional.

and

A lot of readers asked if Apple shares any information about users’ scanned libraries with third parties. Apple tells Ars “no,” so the RIAA won’t suddenly have a list of every song you ever downloaded or ripped. For the purposes of accounting, though, the company does share aggregate information about which tracks are being added to iCloud via iTunes Match. In other words, EMI will be able to know that 2 million users have Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” in their library, but not which particular users have it.

Unsurprising, unfortunately also means that iTunes Match will not be available outside the US right now. Which is a total buzz-kill. For details check out the article in the link.

Demoted →

John Gruber:

iCloud is the new iTunes. The tethered digital hub is dead; long live the wireless digital hub. Apple sees iCloud as shaping the next ten years the way the iTunes-on-your-Mac/PC digital hub shaped the last ten.

And:

Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.

What labels love about Apple's upcoming iCloud →

But it’s this subscription model that has the major labels so enthusiastic as it will finally allow them to extort fees for all that pirated audio you may have stumbled upon since Napster was loosed on an unprepared music industry a decade ago.

Cloudy With a Chance of Music →

Shawn Blanc wrote an excellent piece on the state of cloud music services. My setup is exactly like he describes:

In an ideal world I would always have access to my whole iTunes library from my laptop, Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Most people solve this by purchasing a Mac Mini and setting it up as the shared media library for the house. This is a pretty good and clever solution for home media library, and would solve most of my problems. The trouble is that: (a) a Mac mini isn’t cheap; (b) if I’m not at home then I don’t get access to those songs; and (c) if I don’t use the mini for syncing my iPhone and iPad then I can’t get all the music and movies I want onto those devices.

And I concur it’s a pain in the ass for syncing. I was forced to move my music library off my laptop after I switched to a SSD (My iTunes library is 170 GB while my SSD is 120 GB).

Shawn is less than impressed with the current offerings from Google and Amazon and prefers owning his music instead of renting it. Living in the US Shawn doesn’t have access to one excellent cloud service we have in Europe however, Spotify. Spotify allows you to stream your music to native Mac, Windows and mobile clients. They also allow you to purchase music. But you don’t need to purchase the songs to sync music to your iPhone or Android device for offline playing which is excellent for traveling abroad. And their pricing is comparable to Rdio, € 9.99.