Thursday, June 09, 2011
Why Apple is charging you to store non-iTunes music in iCloud
If you own some music that you bought from iTunes and you choose to "upload" it into iCloud, you're not really uploading anything. Apple already has it. You originally bought it from them. They just have to store the fact that you are allowed to access their copy of the song. Six million people can "store" Poker Face in iCloud, Apple has to keep only the one copy. Us nerds call this single-instance storage.
On the other hand, if you ripped some music from a CD that you own, and you want to upload that into iCloud, Apple has to actually accept the song from you and allocate disk space to store it. That costs them money, and everyone knows that Apple doesn't do anything for free, so you can bet they're going to charge that cost back to you.
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1 comment:
They are actually charging you to appease the labels. iTunes will actually analyze your local files and try to match them with a single instance stored file. In Steve's keynote, he presented this as a benefit to you since you won't have to spend two weeks uploading files. Apple will probably split some of the subscription costs with the labels.
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