iCloud? iHopeSo

For the last couple of years I’ve been predicting Apple would offer an option to let us move our music from local hard drives off into the cloud. As with all good predictions it’s eventually come true with yesterday’s announcements in San Francisco.

Earlier we’d seen offerings from Amazon and Google - essentially renting out space on their hard drives to substitute for space on your local PC or laptop. The advantage being you just throw at the cloud service all you’ve got and let remote experts take care of the data. Peace of mind, more disc space, greater availability; great features that most would find irresistable. In the USA, more later.

So yesterday Apple played catch up. They also, for many people, overtook. They offer fast, seamless integration into the current iTunes experience. When you subscribe to their service they’ll scan your iTunes collection and replicate that list on their giant servers. This will, pretty much instantly, make their versions of your music available on most of your other devices - your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. This covers tracks you’ve purchased via iTunes Music Store.

Also, to cover music you’ve ripped yourself, for a modest fee ($25 pa) they will scan that music and match it with a copy they hold in their store and make that track available to you. For those who ripped at 128 kbps you get an upgrade to 256 kbps. Any thing that can’t be matched will only then be uploaded.

This is a very, very clever solution. First, it eats up a minute amount of space compared to the alternatives. Even the largest multi GB library is covered by a relatively small datafile - and that’s all Apple is storing. Think you’re getting 10 Gb, think again, more like 5 Kb and permission to access all those tracks that already reside on Apples hard drives. Buy a new album, zap, instantly available on any connected device (as long as its made by Apple). Second, the music industry will love it as I’m sure they will get a slice of your $25; and there’s nothing this industry likes more than money for nothing.

Finally, after years of lobbying, you’ll be paying a fee to the industry for the music you thought you owned when you purchased all those CDs. But hey, who’ll even notice?

Any downside? Well I imagine you’ll have to keep all your ripped music on your local computer so there will still be a need to back up that drive. If you fail or forget to pay your dues the service will delete your cloud music. Many people, having only a small amount of home ripped music, will be better off re-purchasing those tracks from iTunes Music Store rather than pay endless $25s - hey, the industry wins again.

What of services such as Spotify? If you buy music you might be better off with this type of service. You’ll pay more per month but you’ll get an infinitely large music collection. You can also access this via Android - a major advantage as despite the boasts of Jobs yesterday they are losing ground to Google on Android.

The big downside, at least just now, is us here outside the USA. We might get iCloud for data in the autumn but no date as yet for the music extension. And doubtless when it hits us $25 will become £25 (not £17).’