In the short week since announcing iTunes Match, Apple’s new storage/syncing service has already been met with opposition from an important independent label. The archiving and reissue specialists at Numero Group are hesitant about the service for the same reasons we are, that iTunes essentially found a way to monetize piracy by charging to store every song on your computer in the cloud, regardless of how they were originally acquired.
“We feel that a great risk is being taken by Apple and the major labels that have accepted the terms of this new product wholesale with not a thought beyond the 150M those so-called “big four” will probably divide and pay to their top executives. By that, we mean that laws that protect compositions and copyrights for songs are, more or less, being trampled under these agreements.”
The $25/year service has drawn both criticism and applause in its infancy. Whether you view Match as successful because it gets pirates to finally pay for their music, albeit a small fee, or whether you damn it for allowing piracy to continue for that small fee, it is evident that Apple has begun to pioneer a new landscape in digital music and storage. (via Ars Technica)
