Streaming

Mixed Reaction To Apple iCloud & iTunes Match

image from www.google.com Early reaction to yesterday's announcement of Apple's iCloud digital locker and iTunes Match has been mixed. Some focused on how iTunes Match essentially legitimizes illegally downloaded music. Others were disappointed by the lack of cloud streaming. Sample reactions:

  • "Apple throws music industry another life vest….. It looks a concession to piracy — but it at least offers a path to more revenue." (Economic Times)
  • “To download all your purchased music for free to multiple devices? About time! Especially as my computer crashed last week. (And yes, it was a Mac.) We believe music should be connected. People want to discover more music. Not just [listen to the] same music.”- Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, told mocoNews.
  • "iCloud: Just A Lot Of Hot Air When It Comes To Streaming?" was the paidContent headline.
  • "It’s a nice offering, but leaves the full promise of cloud-based music up in the air." (Evolver.fm)
  • ""With its launch, the odometer on the music industry is about to reset itself (again)..And the results, I believe, will be stunning." – Jeff Price, TuneCore
  • On the MidemNet blog, I wrote: “How different things would be if something like this this had been done in the original Napster era… But along with their reported $100 million in advances, the major labels may have also have just cemented Apple’s dominant place in music.”

Bruce Houghton on 06/07/2011 in Streaming | Permalink | Comments (6)
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6 Comments

  1. “About time! Especially as my computer crashed last week. (And yes, it was a Mac.) We believe music should be connected. People want to discover more music. Not just [listen to the] same music.”- Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify”
    Ha ha, should have bought it on CD then.

  3. Hmmm… Let’s see… Put all of my music in a virtual storage space that I can listen to in most places or put most of my music on an iPod that I can listen to anywhere… Yeah, I think I’ll stick to my iPod (I don’t store music in iTunes anyway).
    Free album download at http://www.facebook.com/chancius

  4. MS and Apple will not sue each other for cases like this. They signed a cross-licensing agreement when MS bought $500M of preferred stock back in the ’90s. Which makes it funny, Apple can make the claim of “Redmond starting their photocopiers” but they are allowed to and it was that copying that actually saved Apple at one time.

  5. There is a big difference in business models between Microsoft, Google and Apple, put bluntly, if you enter into a business where Microsoft is, usually 3rd parties can flourish, with Apple it is closed and under their control, you can flourish until they decide you shouldn’t, and Google simply kills the market as everything is free.
    That said, there is a definite benefit to succeed with innovation if you have control over the entire ecosystem.
    It will be interesting to see if iCloud will succeed, seems you have decided it will.

  6. Keep in mind this is Apples fourth attempt at cloud storage. (iTools, .mac, MobileMe) For everything Apple does right cloud storage doesn’t seem to be their forte. Besides Google already has products that do everything that iCloud is promising…
    Chris – CoolProducts

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